Searching for Habitable Worlds with David Kipping

How do we uncover distant planets’ secrets? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice explore the recent discoveries in exoplanet study, exo-moons, and finding the stars from our sun’s stellar nursery with astronomer and head of Cool Worlds Lab, David Kipping.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, we, we, we went everywhere on exoplanets.

• 0:04Chuck Nice?

  We got from planets to the ingredients of the entire universe. So that's how much was covered in this show.

• 0:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And exoplanets with moons.

• 0:13Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, we're thinking just it's a planet, but why can't they have a moon? We got a moon, give them a moon too.

• 0:19Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 0:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so we have people interested in the moons of exoplanets.

• 0:23Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and, yeah, and we can, we can actually.

• 0:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, they never be satisfied.

• 0:27Chuck Nice?

  That's what I'm saying. Like, when does this end?

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. A lot of exoplanets coming up on StarTalk.

• 0:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal, this is Chuck with me. How you doing, man?

• 0:56Chuck Nice?

  Hey, what's happening?

• 0:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doing all right?

• 0:58Chuck Nice?

  Doing great.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 1:00Chuck Nice?

  Good.

• 1:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice. A little while ago, you recorded a comedy special.

• 1:05Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it hasn't aired yet.

• 1:07Chuck Nice?

  Um, we have to sell it. Anybody knows anybody at Netflix? I need my money back. I'm telling you the truth, people. I was gonna do like one of those, like, what are they called?

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fund Me?

• 1:18Chuck Nice?

  GoFundMe?

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:19Chuck Nice?

  But I was like, okay, no, listen, if you believe in yourself, go ahead, put out the money, you'll get it back. You got the talent, don't worry about it. I should have did the GoFundMe.

• 1:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, then you're saying that about yourself.

• 1:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. Nah, nah, but hopefully, um, hopefully it'll be out very soon.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we'll look for that. So it's another Cosmic Queries today, and it's bespoke.

• 1:35Chuck Nice?

  Very bespoke.

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not a grab bag.

• 1:37Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 1:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the topic is Fool World.

• 1:41Chuck Nice?

  Uh.

• 1:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 1:44Chuck Nice?

  What?

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know like a little bit about Fool World, but I don't know enough to do a whole Cosmic Queries on it. So we combed the hood.

• 1:52Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And up the street, there's an entire university.

• 1:56Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Called Columbia.

• 1:57Chuck Nice?

  It is.

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's where I got my PhD.

• 1:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Columbia.

• 2:00Chuck Nice?

  Yes, it's, uh, it's the, um, it's the Rutgers of Harvard here in New York City.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 2:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we have a professor of astronomy from Columbia.

• 2:12Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  David Kipping, welcome.

• 2:14Chuck Nice?

  The leader of all cool worlds.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  I'm the man right here. Yeah. Thank you for having me, guys.

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. So you have you're head of the Cool Worlds Lab. So since you're a scientist, not a hipster, I have to believe that the word cool references temperature and not attitude.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  It's a bit playful, but yeah, we're not dope worlds.

• 2:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't work. That's what you should have named.

• 2:36Chuck Nice?

  That's a that would be a make.

• 2:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You should have named it.

• 2:38Chuck Nice?

  The dope worlds lab.

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you've lost that opportunity.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Proposals might be a bit tricky if we have that on the tagline, but.

• 2:45Chuck Nice?

  Check my temperature, yo.

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause my planet's a dope.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  Or sick. We go sick, maybe.

• 2:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sick is another one. You ready for this?

• 2:55Chuck Nice?

  Sick world.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  I go, I'm down with the kid.

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sorry. You caught me on that one. It's been my experience that anyone who says I'm down with the kids is not down with the kids.

• 3:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So cool worlds, we're referring in your particular case to worlds outside of our solar system, exoplanets or exoplanet moons. Anything exo.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  And exo rings and exotrogans, you can throw it all in there. Exo comets, you go.

• 3:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Well, tell them what you mean when you say exotrogans.

• 3:32Chuck Nice?

  Cause you saw me. I went, you saw what I did. So I was just like, I've heard, I've heard of the birth of a star. I've heard of that.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where they don't use Trojans.

• 3:42Chuck Nice?

  Yes. But the Trojans are like.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Why are we going back to ancient Greeks? Yeah, this is around Jupiter. There are these additional small bodies called Trojans and they they're in the little grunge point. So Jupiter, as it goes around its orbit, it looks 60 degrees off axis on either side. There's the Trojans and the Greeks. And it's these small collection of asteroids and small bodies. And so we think we could detect those around other stars. And so then there would be exo Trojan.

• 4:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Put XO in front of anything.

• 4:12Chuck Nice?

  And you're good to go. Put XO in front, put some XO on it.

• 4:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that La Grange point is the Sun and Jupiter. So, so that would be, I guess, L one, two, three, four, L three, four.

• 4:25Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. We did a whole thing on La Grange point.

• 4:27Chuck Nice?

  Yes, we did.

• 4:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We did.

• 4:29Chuck Nice?

  Yes. This is why, and people say, when I, when I say things like, right, or okay, they think I'm just playing along to look like I'm like, oh, I'm in on this. But what they don't understand is that we've talked about this stuff.

• 4:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 4:42Chuck Nice?

  And what's happening is it's coming to my memory and I'm like, right.

• 4:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  You should have an honorary.

• 4:48Chuck Nice?

  Not, not at all.

• 4:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll find some certificate on there.

• 4:53Chuck Nice?

  See, I'm afraid to receive that just because they're like, oh, you should know a lot more. You should actually know a lot more than you do.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  This can't be right.

• 5:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So our solar system is a template for you to think about and imagine what could exist in other star systems.

• 5:08Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Indeed.

• 5:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's fair, fair to say.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 5:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 5:11Chuck Nice?

  Are there any super anomalous solar systems I come across that are just so unlike ours that it really perks things up? Or do most of them just kind of fall in line?

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I'm going to answer for him.

• 5:23Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 5:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All of them.

• 5:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 5:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really? Okay, now go, you give your answer.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  I would, I would say you're not too far off here. I'd say that the majority of solar systems look radically different that of our range.

• 5:32Chuck Nice?

  That's amazing.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have binary star systems, which, you know, are very, very common.

• 5:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's a half of all the stars you see in the night sky have multiple stars. Two or more.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  And just off the bat, the most unusual, even having a Jupiter is unusual. Only 10% of single stars have a Jupiter-like planet. So just having not just one, but two Jupiters in our solar system is already kind of unusual.

• 5:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two Jupiters would be Jupiter and Saturn.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, I'm going to throw Saturn in because it's the same size. It's very different mass, but it's roughly the same size.

• 5:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'd be nice to it because Saturn is one of my, see my desk lamp here?

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 6:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you can't, you guys can't see.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  No shade on Saturn. It's beautiful, yeah.

• 6:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My desk lamp, I, and made in wood shop in seventh grade. And it's a ring, it's made of wood and it's a ball in a ring and you press down the ring and the ring tips, it turns the light on. So me and Saturn go way back. So don't, don't just lump it in with Jupiter.

• 6:23Chuck Nice?

  And he only lost one finger, make it.

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I also, in my notes here, it says there's a YouTube channel on this?

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've got a, yes, my team is called the Cool Wars Lab at Columbia University. We're a research group, have currently four graduate students in my team, and we're studying all different projects, looking for exo-moons, looking for these weird phenomena around these cool planets. But at the same time, when I first arrived at Columbia, which was eight years ago now, I decided one of the things I wanted to do was also talk about science. As you're well aware of the importance of doing that in popular culture. So I started a small YouTube channel, didn't think Holly and would watch it, but during COVID, many people decided, for whatever reason, they were interested in astronomy.

• 7:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you post there about it with what frequency?

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Usually once every three weeks or so. Yeah. So it's, I mean, I have a full-time job doing my research, so I can't post as much as I'd like. People moan about that all the time, but you know, it keeps, it keeps things fresh by having one for in research and one for in the science world.

• 7:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, otherwise you get stale in both.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Perhaps, yeah.

• 7:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It doesn't happen. Yeah. Now, you said you have four graduate students. When someone boasts of how many graduate students they have, it means there's actually a lot of work that needs to be done. And they will do work because they need to get their degree, and you alone stand between them and their degree.

• 7:37Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's, that's too much power for one man to have. That's terrible.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Great power.

• 7:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have evidence that there's life after this arrangement. One of your former students we've had as a guest on Startalk, who was that?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Moya McTeer.

• 7:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Dr. Moya McTeer. Yeah, she was one of my first PhD students.

• 7:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got to say doctors.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It came through.

• 7:56Chuck Nice?

  By the way, that doctor's courtesy of me, Mr. Kipping.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. It does feel like an honor to bestow, you know, help these students get to that point. I mean, I will actually come to the defending the PhD. It's not just my decision, of course. I'm actually supposed to keep my mouth shut and let, you know, the other people decide.

• 8:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's actually a committee that puts you through the wringer. They're not there to be nice to you. They're there to stump you. And the less stompable you are, the better a scientist you become.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  I gave all my PhD students, I think, a lightsaber. So I think Moya probably has one buried in her cupboard probably at some point.

• 8:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just in case.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Bestow upon her with a lightsaber her PhD.

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, but the thing is, an actual saber will stop at your shoulder, whereas a lightsaber won't.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  This is just a toy lightsaber.

• 8:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A toy lightsaber.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Just relax. I'm quite there, yeah.

• 8:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let people know that we actually have real lightsabers out there.

• 8:46Chuck Nice?

  Right. You can tell all of Dr. Kipping's students because they have a very significant burn.

• 8:53Chuck Nice?

  Goes from their shoulder to their navel.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  The only way to know.

• 8:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me, before we get to our Patreon questions, tell me, what are some of your challenges? How much of what you do is is theory or modeling or observations? What telescopes do you use? Do you have a favorite spot in the universe using Kepler data? What feeds your operation?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  It's a big bag of all sorts of stuff, to be honest. I mean, I'm kind of glad that you didn't ask, are you a theorist or an observer? Because I really don't like labels like that. I kind of feel like if you call yourself an observer, you know, somebody goes to the telescope, looks for different objects in the sky, it kind of limits your mind space, right? So now you think, well, I can't do the hard theory stuff because I'm an observer and vice versa. I tried to keep my feet sort of in every pocket as I can to try and stay nimble. But the data set we're excited about at the moment is JWST, of course, like many people.

• 9:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  JWST is touching everybody.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, not in that way, but in the good.

• 9:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You weren't thinking that. You're the one, you're just, okay.

• 10:00Chuck Nice?

  I like it, though.

• 10:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's infrared data of what objects?

• 10:06Speaker 02

  The observations we're planning in October will be of a Kepler planet, actually, called Kepler 167E, just rolls off the tongue.

• 10:14Chuck Nice?

  Why, why Kepler? Why is it Kepler?

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Kepler was great for finding cool worlds because it was very patient. So it stared at the same.

• 10:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kepler's been dead for 400 years.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Not Johannes Kepler.

• 10:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, thank you. Okay.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  We should not be thinking about Johannes, but the telescope named in his honor.

• 10:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. Okay, there's a telescope.

• 10:32Chuck Nice?

  Listen, so we got a medium.

• 10:35Chuck Nice?

  It appears the Kepler says.

• 10:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His spirit, energy.

• 10:37Chuck Nice?

  There's this planet. Okay, but go ahead.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  So this planet was discovered by the Kepler mission, I should say, the NASA Kepler mission. And it was apparently I discovered, curiously enough. And it turns out this is pretty much the best planet for looking for exo-moons out there. It is a.

• 10:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exo-moons.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Exo-moons. It is a Jupiter twin. It has the same mass as Jupiter within 1%, the same radius within 5%, has the same equilibrium temperature, it's the same kind of coldness, if you like, as Jupiter. It's in a similar kind of system, a multi-planet system on a circle. Everything's just like boom, boom, boom, everything looks like Jupiter.

• 11:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jupiter has a bajillion moons of its own, and so presumably that's the case here.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:12Chuck Nice?

  Can I ask maybe a dumb question?

• 11:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just want to emphasize here that you're about to make progress. Using a telescope, it is building on the progress of a previous telescope.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  That's right, right, yeah.

• 11:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not just people pulling stuff out of nowhere. We are all standing on the shoulders of hardware that came before.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:32Chuck Nice?

  Amazing.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm at the end of a, you know, this is a 12-year personal journey trying to find these exo-moons for me at this point. So we thought we're still winning. We're hoping this is gonna be the one.

• 11:41Chuck Nice?

  So this is my ad question about exo-moons. So now, when you're looking at the planet, it's pretty easy because you're looking for it to transit the star.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:50Chuck Nice?

  Now, if that's how you're finding the planet.

• 11:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how Kepler found all of this planet.

• 11:56Chuck Nice?

  If Kepler found all of this.

• 11:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The transit, the eclipse was in front.

• 11:59Chuck Nice?

  Are you looking for the reflection of light off the planet for the moon to transit in front of the planet? Or you're looking for the moon itself to also transit the star? Where is the blockage of light that lets you know that this is indeed a moon?

• 12:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Translation, how the hell do you detect?

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm. Short answer is option two. You kind of said, we look for the shadow of the moon in front of the star. So if the planet, it's a shadow really that blocks out starlight, that's what gives us this dip in starlight.

• 12:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  If there's a moon there, it will either be trailing or behind. And so we'll see this little extra dip in light.

• 12:33Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  And it's that, so we see two dips, one huge one due to the planet. And then we zoom right in on that data and hopefully we see a tiny little one due to the moon. Or even multiple, maybe multiple dips, of course, yeah.

• 12:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but wait a minute. Okay, so you're in a cool world's lab, but all you're getting here is a cool shadow.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 12:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I feel like Plato's cave right now. You don't know jack about the object that's making that shadow.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  No, it's a limited technique. I mean, what we get from this is essentially the size of the object. We can't figure out how far away from its planet it is, it's some major axis. And maybe we could figure out some other things such as its orbital period, its inclination. So just the bare, the bare bones.

• 13:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The bare bones, that's not a world yet to me.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  No.

• 13:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The world is what's going on on the surface.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, but we will get there. I mean, we're hoping to build telescopes like. The Habitable Worlds Observatory, HWO, which might get rebranded one day to something else, perhaps like Kolsakeen Observatory or something.

• 13:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh. That sounds good.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  Very fun.

• 13:33Chuck Nice?

  Let me tell you something that's gonna get you a lot more play than Habitual World.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't like the name.

• 13:38Chuck Nice?

  Habitable World.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  I can barely say habitable, so I don't want that.

• 13:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, habitable, yeah.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  But this, this telescope will take actual photos of, of plants one day. And so then we really would get a sense of its color, its atmosphere, and maybe even some surface properties. So we'll get there, but it's all baby steps. You know, it's, it's, you can't just jump straight to the end.

• 13:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You won't be able to see dinosaurs walking on it.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  No, no, you'd need a telescope even larger than this one to have any chance of that, yeah.

• 14:14Speaker 03

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

• 14:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I'm, I'm impressed that we were able to solicit questions on this very bespoke topic.

• 14:36Chuck Nice?

  And we got a lot of them.

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool world.

• 14:38Chuck Nice?

  I mean, a lot of them.

• 14:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's, let's pivot.

• 14:40Chuck Nice?

  People like you.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  People love the cool world.

• 14:42Chuck Nice?

  They really do.

• 14:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And maybe they could be fans of your YouTube channel even.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  There might be one or two, but not, not.

• 14:46Chuck Nice?

  Ah, don't, don't sell yourself short, David. Don't sell yourself short.

• 14:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 14:51Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. Hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Kipping, Lord Nice. I am Sai from Akhenata, India. Chuck, I thought we can test your pronunciation on names of towns this time. Really, don't do that. These people, what's going on?

• 15:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're trying to bring you along, Chuck.

• 15:07Chuck Nice?

  Uh, no.

• 15:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Trying to help you.

• 15:09Chuck Nice?

  Uh, my question to Dr. Kipping is, in your studies, you've worked with the concept of occultations, uh, to detect exo-moons and planets. You, could you paint us a picture of how this works? And are these the most important cosmic red, red com?

• 15:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  According to you?

• 15:26Speaker 02

  There was a famous astronomer, Henry Norris Russell, in 20th century, he once said that eclipses are the royal road to success.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  I love that quote. It just goes to show you how eclipses are like a shortcut. They allow us to see things that's kind of ahead of our technology yet. Like, we shouldn't have the ability, really, to know anything about 5,000 exoplanets, because we can barely take images of nearby planets. It's still something we're struggling to do. But using this trick of seeing a planet pass in front of a star, it gives us an extra window, and it only works in some cases. You have to have just the right alignments. You have to be lucky. But when you get that lucky fortuitous alignment, it gives you this unique ability to probe all these extra things, like the period, the semi-major axis, the size of the planet. So it's our first luck at these things.

• 16:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, you're only seeing systems that happen to be edge on to your field of view.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Or nearly edge on.

• 16:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me say that in the negative. None of the other systems are going to give you these eclipses, these transit phenomenon. And so they go undisgussed, unrecognized, uncatalogued.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  For now. We'll get them one day.

• 16:31Chuck Nice?

  Look at that.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Of course, we can get some of those using other methods.

• 16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Other methods.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  For instance, the radial velocity method has also been very successful. Not as successful as transits, but that's discovered hundreds of planets in its

• 16:40Chuck Nice?

  Now you have to tell us what the radial velocity is.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Okay. So this is wobbling stars. So as you see, if you look at a star's light, and you see it being blue-shifted a little bit, then periodically red-shifted, that is telling you it is moving back and forth. When it's blue-shifted, it's coming towards you, red-shifted away from you. So it's just like the siren of the ambulance going down the street.

• 16:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, what a nice... I like the picture.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, you see, you hear the pitch change. When we hear that pitch change, or really see a pitch change in the color of the light of the star, that is telling us that something gravitationally is tugging on that object, and that's how we can infer planets indirectly. So there, you don't need the precise alignment. Although if it was completely 90 degrees off, we would see nothing, because then the star would be doing this, it kind of wobbling in the plane, and so we wouldn't have any blue-shift or red-shift.

• 17:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not coming towards you or away from you.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. But most of the time, we can still get it.

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think what we have in our favor, because I did this calculation now 30 years ago. Haven't done it lately, but I don't see why the math would change.

• 17:35Chuck Nice?

  Over time.

• 17:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Over time. But if you do this, you are statistically more likely to discover edge-on systems than face-on systems, if you do the math on that. So...

• 17:48Chuck Nice?

  David's looking at you like, as your peer, I'm gonna have to review that. All right.

• 17:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what else you got?

• 17:59Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. All right, so this is Lisa Cotton. She says, Dear Dr. Tyson, David, Lord, nice greetings. This is Lisa from North Hero, Vermont. I'm a fan of both StarTalk and Cool Worlds, and I love watching both shows on YouTube. One thing that I have been pondering lately is the birth of our star, the sun. It seems like a lot of talk happens about when the sun dies. What I would like to know is, was our sun born in a star nursery? And if so, would we know which one? Or be able to predict where it might have been or come from in the Milky Way galaxy? Thank you so much, and keep up the excellent work.

• 18:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, we love this. We got good, we got good fans out there for this.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a really intriguing question. And it's a question that I know many of my colleagues are thinking very hard about, even at Columbia. So, you know, of course, the sun must have been born, we think, in a stellar nursery. And so there would have been siblings born alongside with us from that giant molecular cloud that collapsed and fragmented and formed all these small stars. We don't know exactly how many, but there's probably many such stars. And the question is, what happened to them? Over billions of years, this, the stars will disperse. They'll move into slightly separate directions. And especially because of tidal forces from the, from the galaxy, they'll get kind of pulled apart and could be essentially long-lost siblings at this point, you know, spread across half the galaxy or more.

• 19:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the sun, given its age and its speed, it's been around the center 20 times. And so if it had a whole family 20 times around, given everything you just said, that can happen en route, you know, your siblings are long gone.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  But they, they should be out there. And so an interesting question is-

• 19:35Chuck Nice?

  Guys, when are we getting together?

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, we want to have a reunion.

• 19:40Chuck Nice?

  You guys never stand time.

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me Zoom, we'll do it next time.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  So a family reunion might be possible, at least in a, in a sense of discovering them, by actually looking at the chemistry of those stars. That there is an active effort to- To measure the detailed chemistry, the abundances of every single element you can think of inside these stars and compare them to that of our sun. And these sibling stars should have not only the same age, of course, but also the same chemistry.

• 20:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So a gas cloud not that far away would still have all these elements, but not in the exact amounts relative to each other.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's like a fingerprint.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Yeah. So there should be a unique chemical fingerprint.

• 20:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got people looking to get the family back together.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, cool.

• 20:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get the band back together.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  I don't know the latest on that, but I know that there are many astronomers who are hunting hard for those. And I think we'll probably hear big news when they're discovered.

• 20:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me restate that question, but in another kind of way, because we can't see the birth of the sun, having happened in our past, but we see the birth of other stars.

• 20:41Chuck Nice?

  Nobody made a videotape, unlike people who really disturb you by trying to show you theirs.

• 20:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how much insight are we getting now that we can see stars being born with their planets? How much insight from these other systems do we then bring back to ours?

• 20:57Speaker 02

  There are some startling things we've discovered. I mean, one thing from direct imaging, which is actually taking photos of these young planetary systems in the process of forming planets.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Catching in the act.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, they're very young, hundreds of millions of years old or less.

• 21:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's young.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  That's young in cosmic terms. One thing that's very startling about these is we see, and I mentioned earlier that Jupiters are rare, but that's immature systems. In these young systems, you actually do find lots of Jupiters. And what's strange is that they're really, really far from their star. They're an order of hundreds of AU. So an AU is the Earth's orbit around the sun. So.

• 21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Astronomical unit.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Yes. Jupiter is five AU, Saturn, I think, is about 10 AU. So these things are 10 times more than that. That's sort of the distance where we talk about looking for planet nine. You know, planet nine is being hypothetical planet in the solar system.

• 21:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really long way.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  And we're discovering Jupiters very often that far out. And they're very massive. They're actually bordering on brown dwarfs, which are like sort of 10 to 20 times the mass of Jupiter. And that is a mystery. It's, you know, maybe the solar system then also formed such planets, but they were somehow lost. Because these things are so far out that they may be tenuously held gravitationally and would be stripped away. And there's an active.

• 22:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They would be, what is the way you call them? vagabond planets?

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Rogue worlds, yes, free floating planets. There's recently, there's discovery of what's called jumbos, which is pretty interesting. These are Jupiter.

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's an acronym. Oh, please.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  Jupiter. Binary Jupiter, binary mass objects, I think. So these are two Jupiters, and these are free-floating. So not just one Jupiter hanging out in space by itself, but two of them orbiting around each other. And we can understand how maybe one Jupiter could get kicked out of its solar system. But how the hell do you end up with two bound to each other?

• 22:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're right, and they're together.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's so weird. We don't understand those. Those are jumbo.

• 22:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The pair is called a jumbo.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  Recently discovered by JWST in the Orion Nebula.

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If they do something stupid, we call it a bimbo.

• 22:57Chuck Nice?

  Ooh, what a great question. Good for you. All right.

• 23:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look at all these questions you're scrolling through here.

• 23:03Chuck Nice?

  I'm telling you, this is like unbelievable. These people, we have great listeners, that's all I can say.

• 23:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 23:08Chuck Nice?

  This is Gabriel, and Gabriel says, "Hello, fellow stellar satellite riders. Gabriel here from Okinawa.

• 23:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice.

• 23:16Chuck Nice?

  What's the fastest rotating star we have found per pre-nova? And what would hypothetically be the fastest possible? How does this rotation affect the star's atmosphere, fusion, and life cycle? Thank you and love you, guys."

• 23:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These questions are getting in it.

• 23:34Chuck Nice?

  They are.

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:36Chuck Nice?

  Laser-focused questions here.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so stars all spin. The sun is spinning. I think its rotation period is about once every 27 days, something like that. And that's not untypical. Many stars have similar rotation periods, but they change their spin over time. So they actually tend to spin down. So again, if we go back in time to when the sun was young, it would have been probably spinning much, much faster and probably arguably close to its breakup speed. So there's a certain speed called breakup speed, where it's rotating so fast that the centrifugal forces outwards are comparable to the gravitational forces inwards. And so it's all.

• 24:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'll break up any relationship, you know?

• 24:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, you don't want to spin too fast in one relationship. So stars are probably, when they're very young, have these extreme rotation speeds. One thing I actually learnt from one of my, one of your colleagues, right here at the Museum of Natural History in recent, on my podcast, on the Cool Worlds podcast, was that the- The Cool Worlds has a podcast? We do. You don't only have a lab, you've got a YouTube channel and a podcast? Yeah, I just slipped that. Okay, very nice. You see what I did there? Very nice. So we, we had Jackie Fatty on my podcast and she was- Jackie Fatty, yeah. Yeah, she was telling me that some of the brown dwarfs are rotating close to that kind of breakup speed as well, and they seem to have rotating periods of order of hours, which is incredibly fast, and they're essentially almost stars, they're just below the masses of stars.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  So, she doesn't like the word failed stars, I'm not going to repeat that. That's exactly why I said it. That's exactly why I said it. Those are objects of interest, failed stars, is that correct? I was joking. So, you know, it's interesting, why do those brown dwarfs, which are presumably quite old in many cases, still got their rotation and the sun has lost most of its rotation? And it's, we think it's probably from an effect called magnetic braking. So the sun has this strong magnetic field, and from that magnetic field, it accelerates ions and particles along those field lines, and they basically get kind of ejected out of the solar system. And once they kind of leave, leave the heliopause and get really far away from the solar system, they essentially decouple from those field lines, and then they just carry away what's called angular momentum, spin energy essentially, from the sun.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  So the sun basically, by throwing stuff out, I mean, imagine you're on a merry-go-round and you're spinning really fast, and if you start throwing stuff in the opposite direction to your direction of spin, you could slow yourself down. And it's kind of doing the same thing. And so over time, these stars break and slow down, and we can actually even use that effect. You call it magnetic braking. Magnetic braking. Again, another- As opposed to electric boogaloo braking. Which is in the Olympics this year. Yes, it is. We have a whole episode on braking. Yes, we do. Brake dancing. So this is, this is a cool effect, and yeah, I was going to say Ruth Angus, who's here at the museum as well. With another museum, right here at the Museum of Natural History. Yeah, you guys have the superstars. The Department of Astrophysics, we've got some good people. Good people, and she's been showing that you can use this to age stars, so you can actually use the speed to figure out how old the star is.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Age date them. Yeah. Yeah, it's called gyrochronology. Wonderful. Gyrochronology. Yeah.

• 26:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What else you got?

• 26:30Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. Uh, this is Zach Meti, or Meti, no, Meti, who says, uh, "Good morning," or "Afternoon, Dr. Tyson, uh, Dr. Kipping, and, uh, Lord Nice. My name is Zach Meti from a boring town of Hermitage, PA. Don't diss your own town, man.

• 26:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you're from Phil-

• 26:50Chuck Nice?

  I'm from Philly.

• 26:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're from Pennsylvania.

• 26:53Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 26:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, all right.

• 26:54Chuck Nice?

  He says, "My question is, since we've upgraded from the Hubble Space Telescope to the James Webb Space Telescope in our orbit, will we eventually upgrade again? If we do, what would be the goal of the new telescope? And what would be expected of it for discovery?"

• 27:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like people like that that never rest on whatever you have.

• 27:19Chuck Nice?

  He's like, "Good for you. I'm on to the next. What have you done for me lately? I'm done with this. What's next? I'm done with this."

• 27:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What have you done for me lately?

• 27:29Chuck Nice?

  What have you done with me lately? What's next, man? And what are we gonna expect from the next?

• 27:32Speaker 02

  I get that. I get that. We always want to see the trailer for the next, the next sequel, right? So, this is it. So, uh, people are thinking about that really hard right now. And it seems like, uh, a lot of people are converging around the idea of some kind of direct imaging mission. So, we want to actually take photos of these distant exoplanets. And the leading candidate that people are currently converging on is called the Hubble Worlds Observatory, HWO. And it may be rebranded. We'll see. I don't really like that name too much at the moment. Um, but it might be rebranded. And the plan is to build something that's about six meters is what the Decadal Survey recommended. This is every 10 years astronomers come together and they all pitch in their ideas and try to converge on what they think the best ideas are. And the one that-

• 28:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why you rarely see us fighting with each other about what should get funded. We go through this very elaborate process where our most trusted among us are put in a room and they don't come out until they agree on-

• 28:29Speaker 02

  Six astronomers enter.

• 28:33Chuck Nice?

  One astronomer leaves. It's the funding thunderdome. Reality show.

• 28:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Speaking of the decadal surveys, has the habitable worlds observatory showed up in one of them yet?

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was the top recommendation in the last.

• 28:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the very, the most recent one. And JWST would have been in previous ones. So they're, they're, they're coming in.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  And Hubble before that.

• 28:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a decade or two before the real thing happened. So anyone wants to eavesdrop on what we're thinking.

• 29:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 29:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how you would do that.

• 29:05Chuck Nice?

  I kind of like that though, because you're zooming in with each one. So each iteration is a closer look of what's out there. So it kind of makes sense in terms of the progression.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, and this is by the way, just what we call the flagship missions. And NASA always has like this one pinnacle.

• 29:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Expensive.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. The one with the biggest price tag.

• 29:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. Slipped that in there.

• 29:26Chuck Nice?

  That's so funny.

• 29:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  JWST, because it's the infrared and because it was conceived to be able to observe the birth of galaxies, which in the early universe emitted ultraviolet, but then red shifted to the infrared in today's epic. But the infrared also lets you see inside gas clouds. So JWST is serving early universe astrophysicists as well as looking into gas clouds that are sitting in front of our nose. I ask you, JWST serves many branches of astrophysics, of people who would not otherwise ever be talking to one another in their research projects.

• 30:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does this next generation flagship mission also serve people who are studying large-scale universe? Or is it just your people who are studying habitable worlds?

• 30:21Speaker 02

  I think we'll see, but obviously the primary focus is imaging exoplanets, but that also means it has amazing abilities, for example, to image stuff in the solar system. And it depends whether you call that a separate field, but planetary scientists and exoplanetary scientists actually tend not to talk to each other too much. On top of that, it will hopefully have ultraviolet capability. So when you go to the ultraviolet rather than the infrared, that gives you access to the high energy universe.

• 30:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it does. Like black holes and stuff. Yeah, good.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  So I think in that sense, it will be.

• 30:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm glad to hear that because one of the great things about JWST is because of how many different branches. How many different subfields within astrophysics it serves?

• 31:01Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 31:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, as did Hubble.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, we want this, we want, you're gonna put a mission of this kind of price tag up there. You want the whole community behind it, so you can't just go singly on a single.

• 31:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those billions price tag, but the smaller missions are how much?

• 31:13Speaker 02

  Oh, maybe a hundred million dollars.

• 31:16Chuck Nice?

  Oh my god, that's something Bezos could actually do himself.

• 31:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He wrote a lunch check for that.

• 31:22Chuck Nice?

  Why are we waiting for a commission? Jeff, we need some money.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  It would be nice.

• 31:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he likes space, by the way.

• 31:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 31:46Chuck Nice?

  C N Scott says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Nice, Dr. Kipping. Cinnamon from Roseville, California here. My question is about.

• 31:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cinnamon?

• 31:55Chuck Nice?

  Cinnamon.

• 31:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 31:57Chuck Nice?

  My question is about the luminous.

• 31:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We had a hamster named Cinnamon. This is a human being named Cinnamon? Okay, fine. Okay, that's fine.

• 32:08Chuck Nice?

  Who knows, maybe this is a hamster. Very smart. Say that. I can't get that out of my head. Very smart hamster. Just sitting here and actually, you know, the translation is.

• 32:21Chuck Nice?

  You know, that's the translation. It's a little. Clicking a hamster on the computer. Anyway, my question is about luminous fast blue optical transients or L F B O Ts. Have astronomers, astrophysicists come to the determination as to what they are? Is it a supernova, kilanova, intermediate, black hole shredding a star? Also, why do you think that the L F B O Ts are so different than others? Or one particular one, which is A T two zero zero two.

• 32:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  First of all, it needs a different name, okay?

• 32:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, cuz that sounds like a nineties boy band.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:58Chuck Nice?

  LFBOT, yo, what's up? It's me, Jimmy, from LFBOT, girls. Okay.

• 33:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I haven't heard of these. Do you know anything about them?

• 33:09Speaker 02

  I don't know a lot about this particular phenomenon, to be honest. But I think it's another, like, another example similar to this, is a fast radio burst, where there's these very strange observations, which we still don't really have a good explanation for. I think it's just a nice example, I would say, of the fact that there is still a huge amount about the universe that astronomers do not agree about what's really going on, and that's interesting.

• 33:30Chuck Nice?

  That's what's great.

• 33:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and every new frontier of observations will bring more of these mysterious things into our awareness.

• 33:40Chuck Nice?

  That's very, that's, that's very telling. I like that. Yeah.

• 33:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you'll see things as you never.

• 33:45Chuck Nice?

  You didn't even know. You didn't even know to know.

• 33:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You didn't even know. You didn't even know.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  And undoubtedly new questions, too.

• 33:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 33:53Chuck Nice?

  That's very cool. Very cool. Richard Hart says, hello, fellow astro explorers. Richard here from Elk Grove, California. My son, Kevin Hart.

• 34:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 34:03Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry. I don't know why that made me laugh. His name is Richard Hart. His son is Kevin.

• 34:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, why not?

• 34:08Chuck Nice?

  My son, Kevin Hart, wants to know why we're made of star stuff. Okay, what are the elements that are made in stars? My daughter also wants to know, her name is Kyreen, if all moons have a frozen core, and does that mean that they have a frozen heart? Oh, Kyreen. And the answer is yes, they hate you. No, I'm joking. I'm joking. I'm sorry.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Okay, so why, why are we made of star stuff?

• 34:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why? Let me preface that. These cool worlds you're looking for, can I presume that some of the motivation is there might be places where you'd find life?

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, for sure. That's one of the main reasons we're interested.

• 34:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, it's just an object out there. Okay, so that, so you then care deeply about the ingredients of life?

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Correct. And the search for it, yeah. So I would just put it like this, like, there isn't really that many ways to make heavy metals, heavy, what we call metals, heavy atoms inside your body, inside planets. And stars are the main manufacturing method which the universe creates these things. So why we star stuff is because there's basically no other way to make the stuff in your room and in your body without having a star. It's all manufactured inside the core of those stars.

• 35:22Chuck Nice?

  Oh. That's so wonderful.

• 35:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's a little cop outy.

• 35:26Chuck Nice?

  Why?

• 35:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, because he's saying, of course you're made of stars. There's nothing else we could be made out of.

• 35:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, that's an answer, but I.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  It depends what you mean by the why. I mean, that's how I would interpret that question of the why. But if you want to know the how, that's a different question. Maybe that's what you're thinking.

• 35:43Chuck Nice?

  That's the disconnect here. So, because I was gonna say.

• 35:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm howing it, you're whying it.

• 35:47Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. Because I was gonna say, if all the stuff in the universe is in the star, well, then that's all we could be made of.

• 35:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 35:54Chuck Nice?

  But how did that stuff get from stars into us?

• 35:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 35:58Chuck Nice?

  Another question.

• 35:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha. Because if it all stayed in the star, this would be a boring universe. Right, there's nothing going on.

• 36:04Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 36:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it.

• 36:05Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 36:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good.

• 36:06Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 36:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so you care that all those same ingredients are on your cool world?

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Absolutely, yeah. I mean, that, what we're hoping is to detect those molecules in exoplanet atmospheres, which would be our first hint of complex chemistry and life potentially in those planets.

• 36:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  We don't know that all moons have a frozen core, because we only know about the moons in our own solar system. What about the moons out there in the rest of the universe? And then you've got moons like Io, which are being actively squished and squashed due to the gravity and the tidal field. From around Jupiter, exactly. So it's not obvious that Io would have a frozen core either, because of all the tidal deformations going on. And we know it certainly has volcanism. So it must have some layer of magma underneath its surface.

• 36:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But would any moon have a frozen core? If it collapsed from something bigger, doesn't it get hotter in the middle? So wouldn't everything be?

• 36:52Speaker 02

  But over time.

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, then it would.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  It'll cool.

• 36:54Chuck Nice?

  It could cool to just being a rock floating and.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:56Chuck Nice?

  Boom, frozen, and that's it.

• 36:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you're saying most things then would have a warm, warm, maybe.

• 37:02Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 37:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe.

• 37:03Chuck Nice?

  So everything's like a medium rare steak.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Right, I'd say so.

• 37:07Chuck Nice?

  It's got a warm pink center.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  But go far enough into the future, and everything will be frozen.

• 37:10Chuck Nice?

  Well, there you go.

• 37:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, oh, right, far enough.

• 37:14Chuck Nice?

  Thank you for that very bleak outlook.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  That's what I'm here for.

• 37:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The world will not end in fire, but in ice.

• 37:20Chuck Nice?

  Oh, boy.

• 37:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, just one more question.

• 37:22Chuck Nice?

  Oh, right, here we go.

• 37:27Chuck Nice?

  He says, this is Andrew O. Hello, Dr. T, Dr. K, and Chuck.

• 37:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, we just know you're Lord Chuck.

• 37:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly, but I like it. He says, how common is it for planets to have atypical rotations? Do they always occur?

• 37:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Atypical, like not typical?

• 37:44Chuck Nice?

  As in, yeah, atypical, as in not, right, atypical.

• 37:50Chuck Nice?

  Do they always occur due to external forces? And it happened to other astronomical bodies? Have we observed a planet that rotates in the same odd manner as Uranus? But in the opposite direction?

• 38:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, maybe they're also referencing the orbit.

• 38:09Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With this rotation and revolution.

• 38:11Chuck Nice?

  Revolution and revolution and rotation.

• 38:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, counter rotating and counter revolving? That's, if they exist, they should be showing up in your data.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in terms of the orbit, yes, we can measure that. We can tell if it's going backwards around its star. And there are some cases. We use this effect called the Rossiter-Maglockon effect. It essentially looks at the redshift and blueshift of patches of the surface of the star as the planet passes in front of it. Using this effect, you can actually tell which way the planet is going over the face of the star by looking at those little shifts.

• 38:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  So that's pretty cool. And we have seen some planets going backwards.

• 38:44Chuck Nice?

  Un-actual people clever. I gotta tell you, man.

• 38:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got the cleverest people using just light.

• 38:49Chuck Nice?

  And I keep getting blown away by like how much it's like either.

• 38:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he can't, he can't go out there and manipulate it.

• 38:55Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 38:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He can't put it in a Petri dish.

• 38:57Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 38:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He can't just tilt it in another direction.

• 39:00Chuck Nice?

  Nope.

• 39:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's gonna sit there, wait for the light.

• 39:02Chuck Nice?

  Whatever the data from the light is, that's it.

• 39:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man.

• 39:05Chuck Nice?

  And you know what kills me? It's like, I look at this and I'm like, you people are the most resourceful people ever. Or you are just making this crap up.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  It feels a bit like being Sherlock Holmes, is the analogy. We're not making, we have these clues and we have to think really hard about unpeacing what's going on. So, you know, with the, with the rotation in terms of orbit, we can get that. The rotation in terms of the actual planet's spin, we can't measure that. There's, there's only been measured, I think, for one planet, and that's Beta Pictoris B. And that's a directly imaged planet. And in that case, it looks kind of normal, but that's the only example we have. So it's actually something we're working really hard in the future of these new telescopes to try and measure.

• 39:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Beta Pictoris B, so Beta is the Greek sequence of the lettered stars. And for many constellations, it's lettered in sequence of bright, brightest to dimmest. So there'd be Alpha Pictoris, and then Beta Pictoris would ostensibly be the second brightest star. So Pictoris is the genitive form of pictor, which is a painter's easel. That's a constellation, painter's easel. And then, and then your, your regular, regular letter, your, your Roman letter was what?

• 40:15Speaker 02

  B.

• 40:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  B, a lowercase b.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Yes. That's the first planet discovered.

• 40:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The first planet discovered around it. And A, you give to the star itself. Okay. And so who's got the most planets out there? That would be the Bob Ross constellation, which is in front of the Pictores.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  I think the record is eight. Trappist one's a very famous star system that has seven, sometimes called the seven dwarfs. They're all such small rocky planets.

• 40:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  I think there is another star that has eight planets that's been discovered, but that's just what we know of. So they surely are even more.

• 40:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what would make headlines? If he discovers one that has nine planets, the Pluto people will rise up again. We want to keep them tamped down.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's wild. Well, let me reflect on this briefly and then we call it quits. All right. So every generation of telescopes, we're trying to answer questions that we've posed. But you know what happens? Those questions and our attempts to answer them take us up to the limits of what that telescope can deliver. And those are the seeds for a next layer of creative thinking about what science can be discovered and what new tools and technology may be necessary to discover it. At any given moment, we have smart people and great technology trying to figure out how this world works. But there comes a time where

• 41:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  the technology can only take you so far. Maybe there are questions you had but remained unanswered because you're awaiting a next generation of technologies to get you there. And maybe you're awaiting more than that. Maybe you're awaiting a next generation of thinkers, students you have trained that will come after you and carry on questions that you've begun. Or better yet, maybe with new technologies, new science, new ways of thinking, there are questions you will ask that you didn't even know to pose.

• 42:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when I think of David Kipping's efforts with the James Webb Space Telescope, there's some questions he couldn't answer with previous technology. He tried, couldn't answer. Now, they're flowing. But what happens next? He sees things that are at the edge of what this technology can deliver. And now he's looking to the horizon. Is there another kind of telescope that can hone in on these unanswered questions? And maybe that'll take me there. And he stepped back and you see this exercise and you say, that's how science works. One idea builds on another. One bit

• 43:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  of technology surpasses what came before it, enabling you to answer questions you have posed and to pose questions you never thought to ask. I wouldn't have it any other way. That is a cosmic perspective. Thank you for being on StarTalk. Dude. And you just right up the street. Yeah. You know, if you discover life, you're gonna give us a call? Oh, you'll be on the phone. Call me. You'll be the 27th person. No, it wouldn't be little green men necessarily, but you might discover something in the atmosphere using the JWST data. We want to hear about it because that'll make headlines. And we want to be there right with you. Okay, he wants to put on his own podcast first, then is on his YouTube channel.

• 43:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And then on the. Then maybe World News. Then he wants to call his mother. Don't do this. Okay, then call us, okay? You'll be fifth to know. All right. This has been StarTalk, Cosmic Queries, with my friend and colleague David Kipping, right up there at Columbia University, Ivy League school right here in Manhattan. Yes. In the middle of the city. Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. All right. This has been StarTalk. Field of grass, Tyson. Keep looking.