Sun Explosions with Lika Guhathakurta

Could a coronal mass ejection wipe out all electronics? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Matt Kirshen learn about The Carrington Event, eclipses, and how the Parker Solar Probe doesn’t melt with heliophysicist Lika Guhathakurta.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Matt, I don't know if I know more or less about the sun after that conversation.

• 0:05Matt Kirshen?

  I've definitely lost some confidence in my knowledge of the sun. But at the same time, I feel like if I'm sufficiently drunk at a party now, I can say some things with seeming confidence.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Seeming confidence.

• 0:15Matt Kirshen?

  It's the magnetism, guys. It's you. You're focused on the heat, but magnetism is where it's at.

• 0:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you know, magnetic fields are invisible and mysterious. In fact, it's the material of the sun that tracks the magnetic fields that tell us what it's doing or what we think it should be doing, whether or not it's behaving.

• 0:35Matt Kirshen?

  I'm also a little bit more scared of the sun than I was an hour ago.

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's earned some more respect out of you than before.

• 0:42Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna badmouth it in case he's paying attention.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me Matt Kershaw, my co-host.

• 1:10Matt Kirshen?

  Hey, how's it going?

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to my office here.

• 1:13Matt Kirshen?

  It's, it's very nice being back.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History.

• 1:18Matt Kirshen?

  I got to walk past dinosaurs. I'm in the office with all the, the science ties and the telescopes.

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The stuff and everything here, yeah.

• 1:25Matt Kirshen?

  All the business.

• 1:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're here in the daytime, so all the animals are in place.

• 1:29Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, all the animals are currently pretending to be just exhibits and while the kids are around and then everyone goes and then we know what happens.

• 1:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So welcome to New York and you're normally in LA.

• 1:41Matt Kirshen?

  I am.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hosting your own podcast.

• 1:42Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah.

• 1:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Probably science.

• 1:44Matt Kirshen?

  That's where we do it from.

• 1:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, one day it'll be definitely science and then call me.

• 1:47Matt Kirshen?

  It's never gonna happen, but we'll call you for sure, but it's, it's never gonna get upgraded.

• 1:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So today, we're doing an entire episode on the sun.

• 1:57Matt Kirshen?

  I'm aware of that thing.

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you heard of the sun?

• 1:59Matt Kirshen?

  I've heard talk of it.

• 2:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, the sun's been busy lately.

• 2:04Matt Kirshen?

  Oh, it's been hiding.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hiding and then not hiding.

• 2:08Matt Kirshen?

  And it's been sending off little.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, right.

• 2:11Matt Kirshen?

  It's been spotting, it's been a.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know a little bit about the sun, but not enough to make a whole episode out of it. So we're going back to our good friend from NASA. Welcome back to Star Talk. Lika Guhatakuta.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  You do that very well, you.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  You've got that right soft touch.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, well, thank you. Welcome back. You are a heliophysicist. We'll get to that in just a moment, but with NASA. And you're the lead program scientist for NASA's Living with a Star Initiative.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  I used to be.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so what is Living with a Star? Not that we have a choice.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  It's just as we say it, but it's a program. And it tells you, you know, how to understand the sun so that we can live with its various whims and fancies and storms and everything else that you're seeing.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the sun has attitude.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  You wouldn't believe.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  I think it's a teenage star.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, teenage, uh-oh. Plus it has acne.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 3:17Matt Kirshen?

  So your older stars, your ones that are in the process of dying out, you know where you stand with them. They're a little entrenched in their views.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  You know, it's good to raise children, like I have two. And so you better understand it.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  You know, actually, it's kind of funny. Star cycle and human life cycle, there are lots of parallels. It's kind of wonderful to use analogies sometimes, right? To describe. And that's why I say, you know, yeah, sun is kind of in its.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Bad adulthood phase.

• 3:52Matt Kirshen?

  It's rebelling.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  All sorts of, we don't know what it is doing. We were not there when it was.

• 3:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's why I brought you in here to tell us what it's doing. Now, now you're fessing up and saying you don't know what it's doing. Let's back up. So heliophysics, does that mean you get more physicists coming to your field than astronomers who look through telescopes in their lives?

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Yes. And it's not just looking at the sun, right? Heliophysics is a connected science, interdisciplinary science, where you understand the sun as a star and its impact on everything else it touches. And it touches everything near.

• 4:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sun in its environment.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  As a star and in its environment and its electromagnetic connection to everything else in the solar system, out to the edges of solar system, interstellar medium.

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So do you care only what comes off the surface of the sun? Would you care what the sun is doing deep inside?

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, if you don't know what's creating the energy, you know, how do you know whatever else is happening? And I'm not telling you that NASA devotes time to kind of creating missions that probe into the core of the sun, but we have learned that, right, over time. So what we are doing now is trying to figure out, you know, that energy that escapes from fusion and sort of percolates through the core into convective zone. And that's where kind of all these googly gooks happen.

• 5:31Matt Kirshen?

  All right. Enough of the technical.

• 5:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is official term.

• 5:34Matt Kirshen?

  Tom it down a bit for the late person here. What are we talking?

• 5:37Speaker 02

  So this energy takes a long time to come out, the radiation, right, from the fusion, basically, and it then percolates through the convective zone where all of the material, you know, all of the atoms, they are all blasted into their native.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Elementary war, right? Electrons, protons, ionized nuclei. So these are charged particles. And getting charged by the blast of this radiation. Sun rotates, kind of in a weird way, and many planets do. It's differential rotation. Because it's not a solid body, right? It's got a...

• 6:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So different places, different latitudes rotate at different rates?

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Yes. And all this creates, it's like basic dynamo, right? So you have charged particles rotating. Oh, so that causes magnetism? Yes. That is the key. What do I get? What do I win?

• 6:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nothing.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  So it creates these convection cells and all that. And they take a long time, you know, to kind of porculate up. And so these are the things. We try to probe inside sort of this photosphere, the yellow ball we see.

• 6:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you can't see inside, so how do you get in there?

• 7:01Speaker 02

  We can't see, but we can hear. But we can't hear either. It's all a spectrum.

• 7:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, she's making it up.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Now, let's not compare the universe with our limited range of sensory perception. So that's what we are doing. So we are picking up acoustic. So, yes, sun is opaque to sort of radiation because it takes so long for it to emerge out from the core into the surface.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why we can see it as an object in the sky.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Right. But acoustic waves, it's transparent to that. When we figured that out, said, okay. Like, I can see you in one way, I'll try another way. So we measure acoustic waves.

• 7:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very clever people figuring this out.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  We are, we at NASA, that's what we do.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  You know, but the cleverness is not at NASA. All over.

• 7:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what we do.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  It's all of you. It's the entire academic, you know, aerospace world. They are the clever people. We just have to figure out how politically to maneuver an idea to create enough political will and resources so it'll be funded.

• 8:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's the making the sausage part of this. So you said acoustic waves. Does that mean like the sun rings like a bell?

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Yes. Yes, so it is for fun, actually, we do create what the sun sounds like, or any other data, you can put it right into a sort of spectrum of what it would sound like if we could hear, because the pitches are different, right? Our hearing perception is very different from the way the sun rings, but absolutely does that, right? I mean, there's this...

• 8:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And sound penetrates through.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so you get, like, I know what geophysicists do.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  For earthquakes.

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In an earthquake.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Same thing.

• 8:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, the waves move through.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  So heliosismology.

• 8:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They bend, they can tell you how dense the core is.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Not, it doesn't go as far as the core.

• 8:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not for the sun.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Not for the sun.

• 9:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But on Earth, you can get through the whole Earth.

• 9:02Matt Kirshen?

  But heliosismology is a field?

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Heliosismology is the biggest thing. We see the unseen.

• 9:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you come up with that word just now?

• 9:10Matt Kirshen?

  She just said that.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  I didn't, I didn't, he used it himself.

• 9:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, we didn't use that word.

• 9:14Matt Kirshen?

  But I did successfully repeat all the syllables without messing them up. And I think that, I'd say some Friday night. So, so does, if there is heliosismology, does that mean that it's, there are bad places on the sun to build a house? Like, are you? Because I live in California, I know that's a concern.

• 9:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so you're sensitive to this.

• 9:30Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, exactly, it's something I'm...

• 9:32Speaker 02

  I wish, you know, that Earth would behave like sun, then we would have more of these sensitive sounds, you know? I mean, on Earth, you have to have a massive earthquake to kind of generate these frequencies. On sun, it's routine.

• 9:47Matt Kirshen?

  Okay.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Do not build any house, there'll be car, you know, card of house or house of cards, something like that.

• 9:56Matt Kirshen?

  Class.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Do not.

• 9:57Matt Kirshen?

  Okay.

• 9:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so let's...

• 9:59Matt Kirshen?

  There goes that plan.

• 9:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's look at the sun's resume for this, this past year. So, there was the total solar eclipse that went across the Americas, Mexico up into Canada, and where were you for the total solar eclipse?

• 10:15Speaker 02

  First of all, I wish I wasn't there. But I was, because I didn't get to see the corona.

• 10:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why? Where were you?

• 10:21Speaker 02

  The eclipse was eclipse for me by the cloud.

• 10:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, the eclipse got eclipsed?

• 10:27Speaker 02

  It happens, and only Earth can do that. Earth science people, I complain at them. Like, manage your cloud.

• 10:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, there's that whole other... NOAA has the National Weather Service.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, what are you doing? Don't you get the message?

• 10:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So where were you on Earth?

• 10:43Speaker 02

  So I was in Banderas, Texas. Not very far from San Antonio.

• 10:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're thinking that Mexico, Texas, should be clear even when New England isn't, and it was exactly the opposite.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Completely. I mean, do you think this is global warming? No, I'm joking.

• 11:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's messing with us. You can't have cloudy Mexico and clear Maine. Something's wrong there.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Very disappointing.

• 11:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you plunged into darkness nonetheless?

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Yes, but let me tell you some of the good stories of that. So this was my 13th eclipse of...

• 11:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Humble brag, yeah, I just... Was it 13 or 12? I'm not counting.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  It is nothing.

• 11:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus or minus.

• 11:29Matt Kirshen?

  I've had one. I've had one total solar eclipse. And that was not the one just now. That was in England in the late 90s.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  1999.

• 11:37Matt Kirshen?

  That was it.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  I was in Turkey.

• 11:38Matt Kirshen?

  Oh, cool.

• 11:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, eclipse people know chapter and verse, year, and everything. Yeah.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  So...

• 11:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some can recognize an eclipse on sight. A photo of an eclipse, because the corona is never the same.

• 11:50Matt Kirshen?

  Oh, so you look at a picture of an eclipse and go like...

• 11:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like that.

• 11:53Matt Kirshen?

  2004?

• 11:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you're badass. And we got a badass woman right here. So, so if you've seen 13, so what if you miss one?

• 12:01Matt Kirshen?

  I'll be honest with you. When you said recognize an eclipse on sight, I thought at first you meant like, that's an eclipse there.

• 12:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no. High talent can do that, yes.

• 12:09Matt Kirshen?

  Not that I'm a pretty high ranking in NASA or anything, but that there is definitely... I'm telling you right now, that's an eclipse. So that is...

• 12:16Speaker 02

  But we are not that high ranking. You can just be yourself. You know, before long, you're going to ask me questions to which else I don't know.

• 12:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I've seen one of the longest eclipses on record, because I'm that old, back in 1973.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  You and... Oh, 73?

• 12:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. That was...

• 12:34Speaker 02

  That happened here, not in India. I hadn't made it to...

• 12:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You were in India? Okay, so this crossed the Atlantic and went into Africa. That eclipse went across Earth's equator, which puts you deeper into eclipse shadow than you'd otherwise be, because Earth... Is round. Okay.

• 12:52Matt Kirshen?

  All right.

• 12:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, just get used to that, right?

• 12:54Matt Kirshen?

  Okay. Dropping the bombs on there?

• 12:56Speaker 02

  It's not flat.

• 12:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dude, it's not flat. And, and the moon was at Perigee. So as closest it was to the earth, so it's big. And in June, July, we are farthest from the sun. So we have small sun, big moon, equatorial. So at peak, the eclipse was seven minutes and four seconds. But I was on a ship and we had to pull away because there was a dust storm that kicked up. So I got only six minutes and thirty eight seconds. But that's still, that's still cooking.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  So my longest was nineteen ninety one.

• 13:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know that one.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  From actually Baja, Mexico.

• 13:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yes.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  On the beach. I, I started eclipses.

• 13:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, that one went over Mexico City?

• 13:38Speaker 02

  No, it went through Mazatlan. Did it also go through Mexico City?

• 13:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought that was Mexico City. So it was like ten million people.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Oh, the, yes, it, it went through Hawaii.

• 13:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hawaii.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It went over our biggest telescope in Hawaii.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 13:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  It was insane. This is before I started actually even using eclipse as my source of observation and research. I did eclipse work that this, this, this is like a whole continuum.

• 14:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A branch of yourself.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, it is my life cycle, my career life cycle.

• 14:14Matt Kirshen?

  It's gotta be like Christmas for a heliophysicist, right?

• 14:17Speaker 02

  That's, you know, he started with that, right? Like, oh my God, I mean, what is the resume of the sun this last year?

• 14:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  We had two eclipses. We had annular eclipse in October, a total solar eclipse.

• 14:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me what an annular eclipse is.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  So annular eclipses, I had never seen one before either, yeah?

• 14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they're beauty on their own, but it's still not a total eclipse, but yeah.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  And then so annular eclipse is when you cover the photosphere such that and so he was talking about, you know, apogee and perigee. Moon is further away, it can't cover the whole photosphere, right? So it's covering the central part and it leaves actually a little bit of luminosity. It's like a ring. So you can't see the corona. If there is any, any shade of photospheric light.

• 15:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It drowns out everything. It drowns out the corona. It's very low, low surface brightness.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  But it is gorgeous.

• 15:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And it's, and it's from the Latin annulus, meaning ring. So annular, not annul. That makes sense. Right, right. And so it's a beauty, beauty unto itself, but you still need filters to see it. But you look up at the sun, it's like, what, what happened in the middle of my sun? And if we were prone to superstition, we think something punched a hole through the sun.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  I'm Nicholas Costella and I'm a proud supporter of StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 15:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now everyone said, "Alert, alert, big explosion on the sun. CME category five." Please tell me about the sun burping up these gases.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  So, sun's always done this.

• 16:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's always done this.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Always done this. But see, that's why heliophysics exists. We adopted this name. We made it up and we use it to talk about our connected sun, earth, sun, solar system, sun, interstellar medium, science, physics, okay? And then so now we are popularizing it. And so we have more technology, we have more satellites. So what's happening, we've been studying this very well with Living with a Star Initiative, with Solar Dynamics Observatory.

• 16:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  SDO, yeah.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Yes, with Stereo, which was not part of LWS, but that was my first mission. And then-

• 16:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that was in fact two.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Two.

• 16:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two, yeah.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  And these are incredible. So in the last, I've been at NASA headquarters since 1998, December.

• 17:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Washington, DC.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Right. And the things I have got to do in my lifetime, it's like- Feels like it's insane. So stereo, SDO, Parker Solar Probe.

• 17:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're gonna get to that. We're gonna get to Parker Solar Probe.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  But that's part of this resume part. The heliophysics big year is going to end with this big bang.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna get to the solar probe. So, you're, what did you do to the sun so that half the world saw aurora for the first time in their lives? What did you do? What knobs were you turning?

• 17:32Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, this is definitely not something you should be seeing just outside of Watford.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  No, no. And I'm hoping that the series will continue. So people haven't talked about it. It's been seen as far south as Ladakh, India, thirty-four degrees.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's the same latitude as Los Angeles, okay? Except, you're not gonna see the aurora because, yeah, lights. Aurora is, you, if anybody's in the way, the aurora, you ain't seeing it.

• 18:04Matt Kirshen?

  Well, can I, can I ask, well, I've got two physicists with me. A bunch of the people, my friends and family back in England, were saying it looked, yeah, like a bit of a glowing sky when they were just looking at it with a bear eye. And then they took pictures with their phones, and that's where they got the crazy light show. So why is that?

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Cameras have different sensitivity. Remember, we don't hear, we don't see like the way we want to, but our cameras, yeah.

• 18:31Matt Kirshen?

  Okay.

• 18:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Period.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  But there are people, so I'll tell you something about that. So there, there is a sequence to the light we see, right? So the stronger the storm and the coronal mass ejection, the more, uh, energy sort of pumps into our, um, uh, through, into our, our atmosphere, atmosphere, and all these neutral molecules or atoms, you know, like nitrogen, like, um, oxygen, they start emitting, they absorb this energy and they start emitting lights, you know? And so when that happens, we see the light.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  So if you're seeing green, blue, it's like atomic nitrogen, maybe fifty, sixty kilometers high. When you see that red light, and that doesn't happen very well, uh, very often, it is... Atomic oxygen, you know, and it's not just the outer electrons kind of jumping to a lower state, right, or disappearing. It's the inner electrons closer to the nucleus of the atom. So it requires a lot of energy to pump them and eject them. That's when you see the red light. So it's very special and it tells you a lot of stuff. Where in the atmosphere, yeah.

• 19:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can backanalyze the coronal mass ejection just from the aurora that.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  You know, actually, well, I mean, it's much more complicated because lots of things happen. So coronal mass ejection happens on the sun, right? It goes through the interplanetary medium, solar wind. Solar wind shakes it up, changes, maybe a little bit of magnetic field, all of that. Then it comes to one AU.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How long does it take to get to Earth's distance?

• 20:20Speaker 02

  It's ninety-three million miles. It depends on the speed. So the coronal mass ejection is ejected with a certain speed. Say four hundred kilometers per hour, per second, I forget.

• 20:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Per second.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Whatever, yeah.

• 20:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's still a long way to the sun.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  No, so it can be, but it could be, you know, thousand kilometers per second. That's why I'm saying this. So it can be, the fastest ones can come in about twenty-four hours. And that, you know, is a big one. When something is lofted with that energy, others take three to four days. So we have enough time and we have models. And that's how NOAA is able to alert all of the people who are interested in what's happening on the sun.

• 21:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The ARC here.

• 21:09Matt Kirshen?

  I was about to say, this is an acronym, isn't it? You guys love your acronyms. That's one thing I've learned about scientists over the years, a particular space scientist.

• 21:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, I think. Okay. So tell me how you measure the strength of the CMEs, the coronal mass ejections.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  You know, now that we have. Sort of basic rudimentary understanding and we are observing this from various angles. We are able to actually from just the brightness map, able to calculate its density, its mass. We are able to see the structure move from one frame to the next and you calculate its speed and acceleration. Then we have solar wind instruments at L1, where you are, which is like 93 million miles and you're actually physically measuring the magnetic field, the density and the velocity at that point.

• 22:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, leaving no stone unturned, right?

• 22:12Speaker 02

  As much.

• 22:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As much, so I'm told this was the most powerful you have a measure for, like it was a five?

• 22:18Speaker 02

  G5.

• 22:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  G5, G stands for what?

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Geomagnetic storm.

• 22:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Five.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  So a solar storm that creates a geomagnetic storm, not all solar storms create geomagnetic storms.

• 22:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did not know that, so, so there's no six. This was a five, but is there a six?

• 22:35Speaker 02

  No.

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It could be a six, they just haven't been, I guess.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, if you had something like that, who would be measuring it? It's like Richter scale gone up.

• 22:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so if half the sun blew off the side, I think we need a bigger number than five for that.

• 22:49Matt Kirshen?

  So is, is it, because like, again, this is just people talking on the internet, but is it some, are these things something we need to worry about with it knocking out communications or electronics or?

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 23:00Matt Kirshen?

  That's gonna?

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Totally, so.

• 23:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's both, people talking on the internet and it's true.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  And people can't talk on the internet if this happens, actually, that's a bigger problem for people. It will be silence, radio blackout.

• 23:13Matt Kirshen?

  Wow.

• 23:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The fact that they can still talk on the internet means it was not as bad as they're saying it is.

• 23:18Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah.

• 23:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How about that? If the sun is bursting forth these gases, often, presumably some of them are facing the other way. On the other side of the sun or off to the side. So the only ones that we really care about are the ones that are pointed towards us. Is that a fair that we on earth care about?

• 23:37Speaker 02

  No.

• 23:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No?

• 23:39Speaker 02

  I mean, we live on earth, but we have assets everywhere.

• 23:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me?

• 23:44Speaker 02

  I mean, what is NASA doing?

• 23:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  So, so this last one, you know, last active region, actually, right now, went to the far side of the sun and Venus is getting blasted.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Venus people will care about that?

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. You don't have to have people. But do we, do we still have something over to Venus? We have satellites, we have satellites, right, at Mars.

• 24:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But satellites are people too.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  Every, so robotic and human exploration.

• 24:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we are, on some level, electrochemical, uh, robots are electrochemical. These are charged particles that, what will they do, they'll short circuit?

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Yes, so electronics of any kind can get short circuited, you know, bombarded, saturated. I mean, so, why do we want to predict this? So that everyone can take mitigating steps and they are all different. If you're a satellite in space, you turn off your electronic sensitive instruments. You kind of turn your solar panel, if you can, they'll degrade. If you're an astronaut, you know, doing robotic excursion.

• 24:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then kiss your ass goodbye.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  You bring them in, hey, well, no, we have good spots in space station where we know how to protect them. Yes, exactly. You've got behind a desk. Right, if you're in ionosphere, you know, your GPS satellites can be host. The ionosphere gets very active and energized, so this, it's called scintillation. All communication, navigation is affected, you know, your phone, your internet, everything, that's what I was talking about. You can have blackout, it just doesn't end there. It goes further down. The, the electric current that is produced as a phenomenon of this geomagnetic storm penetrates earth's crust,

• 25:35Speaker 02

  goes deep into the soil and it can create electromagnetic fluctuation, voltage fluctuation for our transformers. And that can lead to bigger short circuit and blackout.

• 25:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the transformers that get, get taken out, it's not because anything hit them directly from above. Oh, it's because the ground picked up charges.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  It's electric current flowing down. It's all, we only work in the realm of mysterious. You can see them, you can touch them. You touch them, you get burned.

• 26:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have on record, is it from the 1860s?

• 26:11Speaker 02

  Fifty-nine.

• 26:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  1850, she knows where I'm going here.

• 26:14Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah.

• 26:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd call the Carrington event. Where, from what I've read, back then, we had railroads. And the most electronics we mastered was the teletype and Morse code. I'm told that there were like sparks coming out of these electronic instruments.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Very true. And it's not that you read, also I read, right? I mean, that's how we gain information.

• 26:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Objectively true information.

• 26:45Matt Kirshen?

  I didn't read it, so we got two out of three.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, but you have to read it. So.

• 26:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so was that a five, a G5? What was that?

• 26:55Speaker 02

  That's the thing, we didn't have anything to measure that. I think it was beyond G5. So you are absolutely on target. I don't think we know enough about the scale.

• 27:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so if that happened today, what do you think would occur?

• 27:10Speaker 02

  It's very difficult to say. So the whole point is when a big solar storm happens, there are several things that goes on. There's the solar energetic particles, there's the electromagnetic radiation, which is the flare. And then there is this expulsion of mass and momentum of charged particles called coronal mass ejection, three different things. And they interact with different aspects of our technology. So it is the coronal mass ejections that really impact. That's why it's called geomagnetic storm. It actually affects us deep inside. If you're outside the atmosphere, then there are other things happening, right?

• 27:54Speaker 02

  Like satellites, like radiation poisoning for astronauts, et cetera. Inside is a geomagnetic storm. And unless you know.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  You know what the earth's magnetic field conditions are and what the sun's magnetic field is? And what is that disturbance coefficient? It's called DST. A parameter we came up with that sort of measures the index, planetary index for magnetic field. That determines how devastating this would be. And we have never, overall. So you know, for Carrington event, the only station that could measure earth's magnetic field was in Mumbai, India.

• 28:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  It's fascinating, just one station. So we don't have good data.

• 28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bombay back then.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Oh, that's right.

• 28:49Matt Kirshen?

  It was always Mumbai.

• 28:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Brits were still running ram circle.

• 28:54Matt Kirshen?

  All right, all right.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  No bristling here, we are all friends.

• 29:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An event that's strong today could take out a thousand satellites?

• 29:06Speaker 02

  I think that Carrington event, and I'm giving you leaker view, okay?

• 29:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Leaker view?

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Yes. Is no longer, it is a touchstone of heliophysics. But given where we are today and our understanding, we don't need a Carrington event to bring all of this technology to knees.

• 29:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're much more susceptible.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Much more susceptible. So we have had, you know, smaller storms that have caused devastation. So we have to be always prepared. And most important thing is it's not good to be prepared if you're not ready to take mitigating steps. How often do you think can an electrical system turn off its power? It's not a joke, right? So you have to be absolutely sure that something horrific is happening. And with what fidelity can we give that information? That's what we are, that's why we try to understand it so high. So the information that comes out from NOAA

• 30:18Speaker 02

  comes out with this science knowledge and we get better and better.

• 30:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Another part of the sun's resume this past year has been to host the Parker Solar Probe. And if I remember correctly, it set some speed records. Because if you're falling towards the sun but not going to hit the sun, you're going to accelerate like there's nobody's business.

• 30:57Matt Kirshen?

  You gotta get, I'd imagine you gotta gap up a fair lick to stay in solar orbit that close.

• 31:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. So all I remembered was that it set a speed record, which was something like 0.0% the speed of light.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  0.111 tenth the velocity of light.

• 31:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I strap your ass to it, it'd still take you 20,000 years to get to Alpha Centauri.

• 31:18Matt Kirshen?

  How heavy would I be if that was happening?

• 31:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's too, nothing, you're too, it's too, no, no, yeah. It all happens at the high end.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  You're just going to vaporize before you feel the heaviness.

• 31:28Matt Kirshen?

  Alright, I won't go on it then.

• 31:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She said you'd just vaporize. That's a, that's a, you'd rather that than other fate that could await you.

• 31:35Matt Kirshen?

  Alright, I'll cancel, I'll go skiing instead.

• 31:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, plus I saw a headline that said Parker Probe Touches the Sun? That can't be right.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, this whole concept about seeing, hearing, touching, you know, we generalize it with our human perception. So touching the sun in this context is really, we have gone into an environment of the sun where there's a discriminator, basically, right? So this is where, you know, we talk about the corona, the solar wind that's coming out of the sun. And there's like this boundary called alpha boundary. And, and so inside the boundary, it's really the magnetic field that dictates everything.

• 32:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like a magnetic boundary.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  It's a magnetic boundary. It's, it's like it's calling the show. So particles are really kind of paying attention to how much energy or momentum you have. Nothing happens. You come outside of that boundary, and then it is the electrons, the protons with their energy, they are dictating the show. They're still coupled to the magnetic field, but who controls whom? It's a power struggle. And we cross that boundary and go, and that was really the goal, right? What happens inside? It's like an event horizon for black hole. And we have gone inside that. To us, that is equivalent to touching because we are measuring everything with our spacecraft.

• 33:09Matt Kirshen?

  Is it kind of like the solar version of deciding where space starts when you're leaving the Earth?

• 33:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, kind of, you know, and it's a boundary, right? And we thought it was just kind of a spherical boundary and all. If you don't have data, what are you going to do? You can make up as many theories as you want, but it makes no sense. Nobody will believe. And so now we are, yeah.

• 33:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ideas is floating.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And we are beginning to see the structure in this zone, in this alpha boundary. And we are inside it and we are going to go a little bit closer in December. And what?

• 33:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in December, it gets closer than ever before, the Parker Probe.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  In December?

• 33:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  December twenty twenty four.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Twenty twenty four, that is the end of heliophysics, big year with a big bang, where Harkor reaches its closest distance to the sun. About ten solar radii from the sun, sun center. So this is where we see the eclipse, right? You see the eclipse, the white light corona, and it is in that environment.

• 34:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how does it not melt?

• 34:21Speaker 02

  We carefully, you know, look to it that we cannot have any embarrassment our spacecraft melting. But we have practiced for a long time, truth be told. We've sent, you know, spacecraft to Mercury Messenger. So we, we.

• 34:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Messenger, the name of the spacecraft, yeah.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  The spacecraft, right? And so we know how to build heat shield. And these, these are pretty amazing, you know, carbon, carbon composite. It's about four and a half inch thick. And so that's the shield. It's a hexagonal piece of something.

• 34:57Matt Kirshen?

  Four and a half inches, that's.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Stick. And then inside, you know.

• 35:00Matt Kirshen?

  Ten solar radii away from the sun.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Well, you know, one of the interesting thing is the corona is damn hot. We know that already, right? But the heat content is not very high because corona, it's very tenuous, very few particles.

• 35:19Matt Kirshen?

  Oh.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  So if you put your hand out, you know, it's not going to, you're not going to be bombarded by it.

• 35:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even though it's two million degrees.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's like it's just hitting you.

• 35:28Matt Kirshen?

  Right, so it's high temperature, but the amounts of actual energy.

• 35:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Energy is very low. Yeah, okay, okay.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  So there are lots of things, you know, and the fact is that we know all these things, right? So we can actually come up with this kind of engineering design. It's amazing. So, so what, so imagine if you were a free, like you brought this up, right? What if you went into the corona? If you were a free flyer on the Parker Solar Probe, what would you have seen? It's pretty insane. You know, what you see when the spacecraft is moving and going through the jungle of magnetic field and everything else, right? It's very different from what we see through remote sensing telescopes. It's amazing.

• 36:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me why the sun goes through cycles and where are we in the current cycle?

• 36:20Speaker 02

  Sun goes through a cycle because it's moody.

• 36:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  Having said that, we really don't have a good answer.

• 36:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  You know, we don't know. Uh, we have seen enough pattern to kind of make these predictions. We are looking at everything we have at our disposal to get more physics based, but we are not there and we don't have all the information. But it is basically the dynamo, right? It has to, it's got to do with the rotational velocity of the sun. It's got to do with its size, the convection cells, you know, the little magnetic bubbles we call super granules, that surface. All of these things together create the dynamo.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  And it is again, not a perfect 11 year, just a 11 year cycle, generally speaking.

• 37:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So where are we now? When you say not perfect, it can fluctuate 10 years, 12 years.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  No, not yet. Yes, like nine to 12, that kind of thing. Yeah.

• 37:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so that means, it seems to me, that if we're headed for an early peak. Some people might think we're headed for a high peak.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  It's a fascinating dialogue going on on the internet too.

• 37:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right, too, because if we're, if we're hitting high points sooner, and it's a normal length cycle, it'll keep getting higher until it gets mid, mid, mid-peak. But if it's just a slightly early,

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Cycle?

• 37:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cycle, then it's just slightly early.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  So, I'm going to share some truth, you know, we don't know everything. We are like everybody else, we take data, we try to interpret, we meaning the entire academic world. And so, it is something to note, that we never know when we reach solar maximum, when it's happening. We have to go down a little bit to know that we had achieved that, because sometimes we have double peaks. So you can go down, boom, and you go up again.

• 38:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's crazy, the sun has been around for four and a half billion years. Seems to me it would have settled into a routine by now.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Well, what did I say, it's like a, whatever, advanced teenage.

• 38:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so this Parker Solar Probe, what are you gonna learn when it's that close, 10 solar radii?

• 38:49Speaker 02

  We already have collected data.

• 38:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's 10 solar radii, this five sun, whole suns.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This sounds very dangerously close.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  It is, it is dangerously close, it's beautifully close for us to gather the data.

• 39:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is a perspective here, it is beautifully close, I should have said.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  And, and, once Parker Solar Probe crossed the Alphen boundary somewhere in 2021. Before that, I wondered, I have devoted a big stock of my life into this mission. And I wondered, you know, and I, I was seeing the same thing, you know, it's going to Venus and then further inward towards Mercury. And I wasn't seeing things that I thought is like unbelievable. Once it crossed that Alphen boundary, it has been insane in terms of the observations we are getting.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  There are so many new ideas that are coming up. And I hazard to say that any one of them is right or wrong. At the end, it's going to be a lot of these things.

• 39:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the end, I want you to be able to predict one of these storms. Otherwise, like, what good are you?

• 40:04Speaker 02

  I think I'm not going to tell you that because my community wouldn't like me. So what are we going to do? We need a next mission. We need to measure the magnetic field on the sun. We don't still have enough data. You think we have seen it all.

• 40:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So do you believe that if you had enough data, you would be able to predict storms?

• 40:26Speaker 02

  I would get closer to saying that with maybe eighty percent sort of fidelity, yeah.

• 40:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  I mean, is it chaotic? We don't know. We don't know what we don't know.

• 40:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in your efforts, however scattered they are, to predict what the sun is going to do. I understand you're bringing AI into help?

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Yes, and by the way, there is a method in our madness. And AI is actually lending some focus. So, you know, our routine practice has been sort of an approach to science where we give money to a single individual to collect data and, you know, create models, magnetohydrodynamic or theories, all that. With artificial intelligence, what we are finding is that you can bring data from all sorts of data beings. You know, space-based data from everywhere in the world, ground-based data.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  Ground-based data collected over many decades before the, you know, space era. And we can actually cross-calibrate them. And then we can interrogate them and infer patterns.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  I'm telling you.

• 41:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That sounds ideal for AI.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  It is. I'm telling you that um seven, eight years ago, if you brought me here, I wouldn't have a word to say about AI. And now I'm a proselytizer.

• 42:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  And we, it's, it's, and I'm not proselytizing out of ignorance because I have supported this activity over the last seven years. What we are finding is incredible. So people are afraid of the word artificial. And I say, there's nothing artificial about artificial intelligence. We should reward it, leave the AI acronym, but it is augmented intelligence.

• 42:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  So how, how do we see stars with telescope?

• 42:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  Isn't having to be augmented our eyesight?

• 42:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, microscopes, every tool.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  So what are we afraid of?

• 42:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The scientist arsenal. Yeah.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Can I say another thing?

• 42:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our overlords.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  Oh, well, we should always be afraid of that, whether it's AI or it's high end computing or anything.

• 42:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or a civilization that somehow wants to discover your country for itself.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  But can I say something else about AI? And this is not my thinking, I'll tell you who thought this. But what, what would 24th century be known for? It is not going to be the century of physics, like 1920th century, where in a century of biology maybe. But it, it appears that we have learned pretty much all the basic laws of matter. So what remains to be done is really it's the complexity of how do you fit these laws together to create something different, especially under extreme conditions.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  And I think in heliophysics, we are really experimenting in that space. And that was Stephen Hawking, not me.

• 43:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There was a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, John Bacall, who was famous for saying, the universe can be described by simple equations and simple ideas, but.

• 43:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It never promises to be easy to calculate. You can't invoke the elegance of a theory on as the measure of whether something is true. Because to calculate something using your formulas can be very taxing.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  It can be, but where we are getting with AI, I have to tell you, it fascinates me. We, human beings, sitting on this planet, you know, send probes everywhere. We have figured out, you know, the stellar structure. We've done all this and we have created the tools of AI. And we have taken the next step of ChatGPT, ChatGPTO. It is getting faster and faster where, you know, we are used to thinking in three dimensional world, maybe four dimension at a stretch. AI has no bounds.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  You, you give it compute resources and, and there is this spark and it's going to figure out things in a way we can't. I don't know how we are going to know whether this is true or not. It, it's a fascinating world, you know, it's where we are entering.

• 45:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you think you'd be queuing off the sun before you predict whether there's an explosion? Can you foresee what that would be?

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Yes, we, we really, uh, look for magnetic field signature, okay? And then so with greater resolution is better. Why is Parker better than anything else we have done? Because it's going so close, even with our ordinary instruments, the resolution has improved hugely. So you're seeing structures, layers that you didn't see before. And so your models were simple and now they are complicated. So that's what we are looking for details. Magnetic field is the key signature and we do not know what the magnetic field of the sun is at the poles, for example.

• 46:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Punching out the side of the.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  That it's the generation of magnetic field that is getting so twisted and erupting.

• 46:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From the differential rotation.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Every rotation, differential rotation, you know, the convection bubbles going up and down, there are all kinds of motions, right, that it is tethered to.

• 46:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This sounds terrifying.

• 46:28Matt Kirshen?

  It is. I also want to know, how does the, how is Parker protected from that? We've talked about the heat shields, but like, how do you, you don't have, you know, you've got maybe, you said like a day's notice, or sometimes several days' notice before it hits the earth, but Parker's right there.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  No, Parker is bracing it as it comes, as we wanted it to.

• 46:50Matt Kirshen?

  Okay.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  And, and so, again, remember, so, yes, a nasty coronal mass ejection, if it's directed right at Parker, could be.

• 47:02Matt Kirshen?

  It could be it.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Not a good moment, could be not a good moment.

• 47:06Matt Kirshen?

  So another reason for me to not want to travel on it.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Well, he'll be behind the shield.

• 47:11Matt Kirshen?

  I take it back. All right, book the tickets. Do they take air miles? Because I got a few miles, but I don't know how many, how many do you need to get to the sun?

• 47:21Speaker 02

  You need solar miles. I think we have to create a new thing for that.

• 47:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Leek, I saw a plot where the activity on the sun, measured by sunspots, just simple sunspots, and that's the teenage acne that's on the sun.

• 47:32Matt Kirshen?

  Oh, okay.

• 47:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you get that from before?

• 47:34Matt Kirshen?

  I got, uh, you know, so it's just caused a little bit of embarrassment, but fucking like the air.

• 47:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, exactly. So, that if you.

• 47:41Matt Kirshen?

  I heard sunlight's good for acne.

• 47:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The UV, I think, maybe, yeah, yeah. So, I've seen a couple of plots where the activity's preceding the model prediction. So either it'll continue to go high, or it'll go high sooner than the prediction.

• 48:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you're a betting person, what would you bet on?

• 48:03Speaker 02

  This activity has actually been very different from where the community of scientists predicted. And there were people, and there were very few people betting on the higher side.

• 48:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  But it is definitely on the higher side. But you know, if you squish everything down, it's not that extraordinary. But still, we are paying, you know, looking at the sun every second, right? And paying attention. So it's definitely gone higher up than we had expected. The prediction was that it will reach solar max somewhere in 2025.

• 48:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  2025.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  And so let's watch. That active region is going to come back.

• 48:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if it doesn't hit peak in 2025, it's going to get higher before it hits peak?

• 48:57Speaker 02

  That's right. That's what peak is. And I think it will happen before that. It just kind of gives that indication. You know, it's like that grand finale thing for fireworks in 4th of July. You just know it's happening because everything is kind of going up in space, right? And it just seems like sun is crackling with that right now.

• 49:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not going to have a coronal mass ejection G5 on the way up. You're going to have that at the peak.

• 49:24Matt Kirshen?

  So you're saying the sun sort of has a sense of occasion?

• 49:28Speaker 02

  You know, why not?

• 49:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It creates its own occasion.

• 49:30Matt Kirshen?

  Yes.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  And this could have happened actually during the middle of the cycle. So that is the whole point. It's not just during solar maximum that these things happen. It's the complexity of magnetic field. That can happen anytime, anywhere on the sun.

• 49:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. One little fact, quick little fact. If I remember correctly, you don't find sunspots near the equator or near the pole. It's only in the northern and southern bands of the sun. Is there any good reason for that or is that a mystery?

• 50:05Speaker 02

  I think you do find sunspots emerging from very low latitude equatorial region, but not at the pole. They get diffused, actually. That's why I was saying that we have to understand the poles. That's the source of what's happening to the magnetic field, which might help us predict solar cycle. So these, you know, active regions, the sunspots, they come up with a certain kind of polarity and move right away from the equator, but then they blend into the polarity of the poles.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  There are funny kind of switches going on over there that we really, because we don't get to observe them very well.

• 50:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So part of the problem is, it's not a problem, the reality is, we're awash in data right now.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Not all of the right kind of data.

• 51:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not the right kind of data.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  Well, they are all right kind of data, but we don't have all the other right kind of data.

• 51:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  Sun is a humongous ball of fire.

• 51:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up with a hypothesis that fits your data, but it's woefully incomplete because there's a whole other set of data that would directly impact those ideas.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  It's said it beautifully. I mean, that's the whole problem. And that's why, you know, every time we have a new mission, it sheds light on what we didn't understand and how simple our model was.

• 51:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Last question, when is the sun gonna die?

• 51:43Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, it's an ordinary star. So what, in like another four and a half billion years, it's going to be old, like a red giant, and then slowly expel whatever it has left. And I think it's going to become a red dwarf or a white dwarf, red dwarf.

• 52:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are we doing with all of the, I mean, in the meantime? We just here on Earth, we're traveling to other planets. We control, reach into the sun and turn knobs in the sun and control it?

• 52:14Speaker 02

  I don't think we will ever get there to control the sun. But if you could control our species and the environment around us, right? Like climate and things like that. And we could do that, I think. But sun is needed. It's our ultimate source of energy. I mean, why can't we figure out how to tap into that energy to solve our power problem? Lot of our greenhouse gas problem goes away.

• 52:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, the sun is just free and available.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  Yes, and our species is evolving, will be something else.

• 52:52Matt Kirshen?

  Can we mine the sun?

• 52:55Speaker 02

  Oh, you mine the sun for energy?

• 52:57Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah.

• 52:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 52:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Natural ingredients, right?

• 53:01Speaker 02

  I mean, you could put big, you know, science fiction is really awesome, right? I mean, they make yesterday's magic into today's science. And there are all kinds of ideas, but, you know, I think technologically we are at a point where we might try these things. Don't be afraid, we'll be here for a little while.

• 53:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I can't believe you've seen 13 eclipses that's out of control.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  Didn't see them, I went to them.

• 53:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, how many of those succeeded?

• 53:36Speaker 02

  I saw eight.

• 53:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, they're still. And Matt, you've seen one?

• 53:41Matt Kirshen?

  I've seen one, one total, and I've seen some partials, but. And the total one was cloudy because it was in England.

• 53:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If 99%, of the sun is covered, the remaining light equals 10,000 full moons.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 53:56Matt Kirshen?

  Because I was.

• 53:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're not in totality, you're not in totality.

• 53:58Matt Kirshen?

  I was in LA for this last one where obviously it wasn't totality. And I was in New York a few years ago when they had the partial one here. You see, you see through the lenses, you see that the sun is missing and you see the cool shadows. But other than that, it's just a little colder than you might expect, but a little dimmer. You can't really tell.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  The difference between a total solar eclipse and anything else is just night and day.

• 54:23Matt Kirshen?

  Yep.

• 54:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I see what you did there. Was that the joke you were ready to?

• 54:29Speaker 02

  No, not that.

• 54:32Matt Kirshen?

  Just this, lots unloaded.

• 54:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a comedian, that's a good joke.

• 54:35Matt Kirshen?

  It's a solid joke. It also just took a beat where I was like,

• 54:39Speaker 02

  Can you say this?

• 54:40Matt Kirshen?

  Oh.

• 54:40Speaker 02

  You have to say this like live because my children think I have no funny bones.

• 54:46Matt Kirshen?

  But that's the job of children though, isn't it? The job of children is to never think that your parents

• 54:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's true.

• 54:51Matt Kirshen?

  Have anything going on.

• 54:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very true. All right, Leeka, thank you. And tell me, Leeka is short for a much longer first name.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  Madhulika. Madhulika.

• 55:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Madhulika.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  Very good. You really do the soft tones, like the French and the Italians. They pronounce my name the best.

• 55:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The best. They and I.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  And you.

• 55:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, thanks for coming through town. I know you're based in Washington and you're in for a couple of days. So thanks for sharing some of your time with StarTalk, catching up on the sun. Because it's had a busy year.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  It has a busy year. And I'd say, I don't know why this is the first time you ask a heliophysicist to talk about the sun. Because it seems like sun as a star is demoted like Pluto as a planet.

• 55:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh. Well, Leeka, thanks for coming back.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 55:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We count you as a friend of the podcast.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 55:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because our, our comment thread lights up when you appear.

• 55:57Speaker 02

  That's because of the, we talk about the sun.

• 56:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It becomes luminous.

• 56:03Matt Kirshen?

  The sun gets involved.

• 56:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sun, yeah, she taps.

• 56:05Matt Kirshen?

  My ears are burning.

• 56:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. And Matt, good to see you, man.

• 56:11Matt Kirshen?

  It's great to be here.

• 56:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, keep going with the Probably Science Podcast.

• 56:14Matt Kirshen?

  Thank you.

• 56:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Any science that's on a podcast, it's okay by me.

• 56:18Matt Kirshen?

  Appreciate it.

• 56:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, you got it. The sun is our nearest star. And think of how many millennia it was worshipped.

• 56:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For its value to civilization, to agriculture, to light, heat, to anything that mattered in this world. I don't know any culture, any pre-scientific culture, that didn't have a sun god. If you didn't have a sun god, were you living in a cave the whole time? And so, we tend to worship the things that we need and respect the most. And in the era of science, scientific inquiry of our world, no, there isn't a god pulling the sun across the sky with its chariot.

• 57:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But there are other mysteries that remain before us that make the sun no less interesting today as an object of scientific interest than it has ever been as an object of religious reverence. That's a cosmic perspective. Until next time, this is Dark Talk. Keep looking up.