Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast Cosmic Queries – Cool Worlds with David Kipping About this episode What is the weirdest planet ever discovered? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice discover bizarre exoplanets like Erebus, the impacts of living on a habitable moon, hot Jupiters, and more with astronomy professor David Kipping.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And we have our cosmic queries edition, a fan favorite. Chuck, you know it's a fan favorite.
0:26 Chuck Nice? They love it.
0:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They love it.
0:28 Chuck Nice? They love it.
0:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They just love it.
0:31 Chuck Nice? Inquiring minds want to know.
0:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what it comes down to. And we put out the expertise of our guests and what the topic is. And then we get flooded with questions. And today, we've got a colleague of mine, David Kipping, from up at Columbia University.
0:47 Chuck Nice? Yay.
0:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He has tap roots from the UK at Cambridge University and University College London. And he's, he's part of what they call the Cool Worlds Lab. We're gonna ask him about that. So are you, are you cool or are you not?
1:08 Chuck Nice? A little brag, a little brag there, a little humble brag.
1:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A little humble brag.
1:12 Chuck Nice? Yeah, we deal with the cool worlds, baby.
1:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? David, welcome to StarTalk.
1:17 Speaker 02 Thank you so much. Yeah, the, the name is, is not supposed to be like dope planets or something. That's, that's not what we're going for. It really is cool, like actually temperature cool planets. But I appreciate that we're kind of cool anyway.
1:29 Chuck Nice? Welcome to dope ass planets.
1:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You wanna be one of us. You wish you could.
1:37 Speaker 02 Only some get it on.
1:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, and so, and you're no stranger to the social media platforms. You've got your own YouTube channel. It has nearly a million subscribers, dude.
1:49 Chuck Nice? Nice.
1:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Keep it coming.
1:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's, that's all pandemic to, to thank for that. I think, you know, we just, I've been making these videos for years and people just got into it recently.
1:57 Chuck Nice? David, David, David.
2:00 Chuck Nice? Let's, let's not be, um, um, falsely humble. I mean, we, we can look at you, David. We know why it's happening. We can look right at you, David.
2:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, no.
2:14 Chuck Nice? We see the Superman swoop.
2:17 Speaker 02 That's just this camera. That's just this camera.
2:19 Chuck Nice? Okay, we see it, David. We, we, we understand when, when you're the boy band.
2:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Across the forehead.
2:25 Chuck Nice? When you're the boy band of physics.
2:27 Speaker 02 There's a lot of filters happening here to make this happen.
2:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, Chuck, the real issue here is, most people just ate Cheetos and binged on TV shows, and he creates an entire YouTube empire.
2:42 Chuck Nice? Man, nice.
2:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, right, there it is. They're crazy.
2:46 Chuck Nice? I tried to, I tried to create a YouTube show on, um, Cheetos and Couch Dwelling.
2:54 Speaker 02 Didn't work out. Not quite a million views yet.
2:57 Chuck Nice? Not quite a million views, but.
2:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, wait, he has a million subscribers, but plenty of his videos have millions of views. That's not even the thing. So let me ask you, David. So tell us, what are dope ass, what's the dope ass Worlds Lab?
3:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, the, it's not, we don't usually go by the name, but Cool Worlds Lab is, uh, it's, it's the research team I started here at Columbia. So, you know, we, we, there was a team called the Cool Stars Lab in, uh, San Diego, I think. And I thought that was a great name because obviously it's a fun play in words and everyone's interested in cool stars. Um, and as, as we've been discovering more and more planets, you know, we know of lots and lots of planets which are close to their stars, but it's the planets which are far away from their star, where the temperatures are cool enough, that we get really excited because then you have the possibility of liquid water or this kind of stuff.
3:42 Chuck Nice? Cool is a relative term, so what would cool be? Like?
3:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, yeah, quantify this.
3:47 Speaker 02 We're deliberately vague in that sense, so.
3:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, there's no, there's no, like, if you're 301 Kelvin, you're too hot, but 300 Kelvin, you're good. There's no hard, there's no hard line. It kind of depends on the science problem, you know? We, we were interested in moons. That's one of the big things, for instance. That really doesn't directly have anything to do with temperature, but actually does kind of work out that way, that when you're far away from the star, there's a better chance of moon. So I wouldn't.
4:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, but you're counting, right, you're counting Earth as being far away from the sun.
4:20 Speaker 02 In this, in this, in this picture. It's a cool world in this picture.
4:24 Chuck Nice? We would be, yeah.
4:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
4:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, so, so why do we have so many exoplanets that are so close to their host star?
4:32 Speaker 02 That's just detection bias, unfortunately. I mean, I wish it wasn't true.
4:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, tell us about detection bias. Tell us about that. Because we hear about bias all the time, and usually it's some psychological bias.
4:44 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
4:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No one is thinking that there could be actual scientific bias that has nothing to do with how, whether you're a bigot.
4:50 Chuck Nice? Yeah, we're, we're, we're used to it happening at a traffic stop.
4:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, exactly. So tell, tell us what you mean by a detection bias.
5:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's, it's not bigoted astronomers in this case. You know, that, that does sometimes happen, but that's not what's happening here. The, the real, the real problem is that the most, the most successful way of discovering planets is this transit method. Sure, you've talked about it many times on StarTalk. The idea of, as a planet eclipses in front of the star, blocks out some of the starlight, and of course, the star gets dimmer. But in order to get that chance alignment, it's, it's much, much easier if the star and the, is, and the planet are very, very close together.
5:26 Chuck Nice? Oh, right.
5:27 Speaker 02 When you put them far apart to get that chance alignment, it's kind of hard to show, but it's, it's kind of improbable that the longer the axis is, the, the less likely is he going to get that, those two objects to line up. And so for that reason, the vast majority are, are far away.
5:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So this is like looking for your car keys under the lamppost, because that's where you're going to find them. So if you're going to look for planets, you're most likely to find just those planets that are close by. And if they're so close that they're very hot for being so close to their host star, I guess that's the problem.
5:55 Speaker 02 Unfortunately for me, I mean, some folks are fascinated by those hot planets. I, I'm obviously more interested in the cooler objects.
6:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? On the possibility of life, ultimately.
6:05 Speaker 02 In, in part. I mean, I, as I said, a big part of one of the reasons I love these things is just exotica can happen out here. You can have icy rings, you can have exo moons, there's even a paper on the archive that will surely get debunked tomorrow, claiming of a Trojan exoplanet at these kind of distances.
6:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So first, tell everyone what the archive is, and then tell us everyone about Trojan. Trojan objects.
6:27 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
6:27 Speaker 02 There's a, there's a regular posting, an electronic repository called the archive, but it's archive with an X. And astronomers can post discoveries, papers that they have. Usually they've been through peer review, but sometimes like the paper that was up today, I don't think it had been peer reviewed yet. And there was a claim of two new planets, which happened to be in the same orbit as each other, which is, which would be a new thing.
6:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Racetrack style.
6:54 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah. They're chasing each other. So that's called horseshoe orbit. And theoretically, that's possible. I just think a lot of us are pretty skeptical about the data for this particular case.
7:03 Chuck Nice? Gotcha. Gotcha.
7:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. And so then you said something about exo moons?
7:10 Speaker 02 We have rings, icy rings out here, moons and liquid water, life. I mean, there's, there's all sorts of fun jazz that can happen. Once you get far from the star.
7:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the kaboodle, that's why they're cool stars.
7:21 Speaker 02 Exactly. Cool worlds. Yeah.
7:23 Chuck Nice? Cool worlds.
7:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Sorry. Cool worlds.
7:25 Chuck Nice? Right.
7:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. So Chuck, you got questions for this man?
7:28 Chuck Nice? I do. As usual. So let's jump right into it.
7:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, just to be clear, these are Patreon members who have at least the minimum membership level.
7:37 Chuck Nice? Right.
7:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Which we reduced.
7:39 Chuck Nice? Yes. We, we dropped it down to five dollars to give you no excuse.
7:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Five dollars. Now you got no damn excuse.
7:44 Chuck Nice? You got no excuse. You know.
7:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Five dollars a month.
7:47 Chuck Nice? Right.
7:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And then you get to ask questions. Okay.
7:49 Chuck Nice? That's it. Yeah. Here we go. For a cool world. What's the largest planet that's ever discovered? And how large can a planet get? Conceivably, how large could a planet get?
8:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Love that.
8:05 Chuck Nice? Yeah, that makes sense because our sun isn't so big. So are there suns out there that are like super big? And then they have super big planets around them?
8:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
8:17 Speaker 02 There's a correlation.
8:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The sun is a planet around a bigger star.
8:20 Speaker 02 Right. Passes on its genes almost. Yeah, not quite. So let's track back. So for planets, usually the biggest planet that was cold, if it was cool, and there was no heat involved or anything like this, pretty much the biggest planet you can get is Jupiter sized. You actually, if you just spoon more mass onto Jupiter, it doesn't get any bigger. It just gets more massive and its density increases, but its physical size doesn't really change. In fact, if anything, actually gets slightly smaller. It gets slightly smaller.
8:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so often in the public, when people say big, they don't always know whether they're referring to size or mass. Right?
8:58 Speaker 02 Right.
8:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I think those are conflated often when people are asking questions in the public. So you make a very interesting point. You can increase the mass of Jupiter.
9:06 Speaker 02 Right.
9:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? By spooning matter into it. And the extra gravity actually compresses the gas.
9:12 Speaker 02 Right.
9:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? More than it otherwise would.
9:14 Speaker 02 Yeah. So I mean, in terms of the maximum mass, let's go with that. Let's just keep spooning mass on. Eventually, it'll become a star. It kind of goes through this period of being a brown dwarf, but I think lots of us think, well, brown dwarfs, that's kind of a made up category to some degree. It's effectively still just a type of Jupiter, some kind of super Jupiter. And eventually, when you start spooning enough mass on, you'll get to the critical point, which I think we can all agree something special happens, which is when hydrogen fusion occurs. There's enough pressure inside the core of that object that hydrogen fusion occurs. And now you have a star.
9:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you've been spooning more and more mass onto it, so therefore the pressures down in the middle keep going up.
9:52 Speaker 02 Correct.
9:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
9:53 Speaker 02 So about eighty, eighty times the mass of Jupiter. So Jupiter's not close to being a failed star. People say Jupiter's a failed star. It has to be eighty times more, eighty times more mass to get. It's kind of a long way off, I would say, from being a failed star. But it has a similar size, physical size, to the smaller stars. That is true.
10:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Interesting. That is, that's really great. Yeah. So Jupiter is really, that's it. Jupiter already has more mass than all other planets combined. Right. But you're saying it could have been even more massive and we'd still call it a planet. And then... Nothing else matters in the solar system, except the star in Jupiter. Like, you know what I tell people, Chuck? That Jupiter is more bigger compared to Earth than Earth is compared to Pluto.
10:43 Chuck Nice? Okay.
10:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So if you're on, if you're an Earthling and you wanna say, let's get rid of Pluto's planet status, and you feel good about yourself.
10:51 Chuck Nice? Right.
10:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If we were Jupiterarians, we could feel the same way and kick Earth out and we'd have no recourse.
10:57 Chuck Nice? Right, cuz, yeah. But, but also size does matter, uh, so Pluto, Pluto screwed you.
11:04 Speaker 02 If you really wanna get these planets big, you have to add heat. So you take one of these Jupiters and you, you park it next to a really hot star.
11:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, then it puffs up.
11:12 Speaker 02 It puffs up. So then you get up to something like 170% the size of Jupiter, so 1.7 times larger. Probably not quite, I think, I don't think we have any ones that are twice as big, but they get pretty close to that.
11:24 Chuck Nice? So, so, so a tad under twice the size of Jupiter is kind of our limits for planets, no matter where they are.
11:34 Speaker 02 As far as we know. I mean, that's the fun thing about science, you never know. Someone might make a discovery tomorrow of a three, a three Jupiter-sized planet. And, uh, you know, there's even ideas of dark matter planets. Dark matter planets would be extremely large, probably larger than the sun in fact.
11:47 Chuck Nice? See, now you're doing your own queries, sir. You're doing your own queries because now we gotta know what a frickin' dark matter planet is. I've never heard of this. That's amazing.
11:59 Speaker 02 It's a hypothetical, it's a hypothetical, but dark matter doesn't like to clump. You know, it's, it's very diffuse, it interacts very weakly. And so it's kind of hard to, um, collapse it down, to cool it down as normal gases. When it, when normal gas gets hot, it cools down, it radiates. And so it cools down, the gas collapses, eventually cools down to a point where you can actually start to form stars cuz the gases has concentrated so much. Dark matter doesn't really do that, but there are some varieties of dark matter models that allow for a bit more clumpiness, it's allowed to kind of interact a bit more strongly, that could in extreme, it's a fairly extreme idea, but in some extreme versions, it could potentially form a dark matter planet, but it would be larger than the sun.
12:43 Speaker 02 Uh, it would, and of order of, you know, just a few Earth masses. And it'd be very weakly bound together. So it'd be a pretty, um.
12:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But then what right would you have to call it a planet?
12:54 Speaker 02 Just that that's for I really don't care about the naming.
12:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a gathering of mass over here.
13:02 Speaker 02 I don't know what to call it. Yeah. I mean, people you talk about Pluto. I never get into that debate. I'm like, just call it whatever you want. I it's interesting. It's an interesting world.
13:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, okay. All right. We're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, more questions for David Kipping on what do we call it, Chuck? Badass World? Oh, yeah. Dope Ass World. Dope Ass World.
13:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Cool worlds among the exoplanets in our galaxy when StarTalk returns.
13:45 Speaker 03 I'm Joel Cherico, and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
14:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back, StarTalk. Cosmic Queries, the Cool Worlds edition with the founder of the Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia University, David Kipping. So, David, what how many people are part of this lab?
14:24 Speaker 02 Let's see, we have I have three graduate students right now. And at any one time, there's somewhere between sort of three and six undergraduates. There's sort of this is some stochastic variation in that sense.
14:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. So this you just you just invented this out of whole cloth?
14:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. I also have an editor as well for my videos. There's a whole there's a whole separate thing of the videos we make on on YouTube. So and, you know, he edits my videos, but isn't involved in the research directly. Yeah.
14:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And what's the name of your channel?
14:53 Speaker 02 Just Cool Worlds. That's it.
14:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just Cool Worlds.
14:55 Speaker 02 I wasn't very creative. I had this one great idea for a name, and I just kept using it.
14:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, because you shouldn't come to me and Chuck. We would have said dope ass planets. Dope ass planets. We totally could have hooked you up, you know. Call next time. You're a time machine, yeah. Chuck, you got more questions from Patreon supporters?
15:15 Chuck Nice? Yep, let's do it from Patreon. This is Richard Hart and Richard says, Richard here from Elk Grove, California.
15:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Elk Grove?
15:24 Chuck Nice? Yeah. Looking at-
15:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That sounds wealthy, doesn't it? Doesn't that sound wealthy?
15:27 Chuck Nice? It does. Elk Grove. It better be, it better have, you better have money to live in Elk Grove. Let me tell you something. Ain't no ghetto in the world named Elk Grove. You ain't gonna find no hood named Elk Grove, Elk anything, okay? You know?
15:49 Chuck Nice? All right.
15:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're the Bloods from Elk Grove.
15:53 Chuck Nice? That's right. We're the Elk Grove Bloods. That's right.
15:58 Chuck Nice? Quite frankly, we don't take kindly to Crips coming this way. I'm sorry, you're gonna have to go back to Moose Lane, you-
16:08 Chuck Nice? You Crips, you. Or we'll give you a stern looking at.
16:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck, that's the seeds of a whole sitcom, you realize?
16:22 Chuck Nice? Elk Grove for life, bitch. Anyway, um, he says, "Looking at Hano Rain's Exoplanet app, there are more than 300 planets noted in the habitable zone of their stars, of which, a vast majority of them are at least half the mass of Jupiter or bigger, sir. Is this just a result of how we're currently detecting planets? Or do you think it's a potentially common occurrence for a gas giant to be in the habitable zone of its star?"
16:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ooh, I like that.
16:53 Chuck Nice? That's a good question and it kinda makes sense the way he poses it.
16:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's definitely something we're excited about and it rings true. I mean, you have to be careful when you look at this, these catalogs like on the app or on NASA Exoplanet Archive, it's another great website if you want to go through all of these yourself. I'm not sure if Hanno is still updating that app anymore, so I'm sure there's even more actually past that, but you have to be careful.
17:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The total exoplanets are over 5,000. Seems to me we would have more than 300 in a Goldilocks zone, you'd think.
17:26 Speaker 02 Possibly. I'm not sure, but in any case, you have to be careful because of all these biases, you know, these detection biases, that you're only ever seeing a fraction of the true number. So people have done the calculation of correcting for that bias to actually figure out how many planets are there really in this temperate zone. And it turns out that you're right, that there are a surprisingly large number, about 50% of all sun-like stars, FGK-type stars we call them, sun-like stars, they have planets with radii in between about twice that of the Earth, all the way up to the biggest Jupiter. So all of those are gas giants, mini gas giants, Neptunes, mini Neptunes, super Neptune, Saturns, Jupiter's, all of that.
18:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that's even correcting for the observer's bias?
18:14 Speaker 02 Correct. Half of all stars have gaseous planets in the habitable zone, which obviously don't have solid surfaces.
18:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, wait, wait, that's something different from what you said. I thought half of all planets in the habitable zones are that size. You're saying half of all stars?
18:32 Speaker 02 Correct.
18:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh my God, that's a whole other.
18:35 Speaker 02 That's a lot. They're very common. That's from Kepler statistics. For Earths, we don't even know what the answer is.
18:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Telescope designed specifically for these discoveries.
18:46 Speaker 02 Correct, thank you. Yeah, not the NASA mission that flew, what was it, 2009 to 2014, 15. So we know that there were lots and lots of those gaseous planets which could have moons, and that's why we're so excited to look for them. And in fact, there may even be far more than Earth-sized planets at that distance. We actually don't know what the number is of how many Earths there are at that distance, yeah.
19:06 Chuck Nice? Wow.
19:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you like the moons because they give you like moons of gaseous planets because they give you a surface to hang out on.
19:14 Speaker 02 Right, I mean, there could be, there could be more habitable moons than habitable planets in the universe. Other aliens could be looking at us thinking, what's going on over there? Why are they living on a planet like most of us live on moons?
19:25 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
19:26 Speaker 02 That's why they're not interested in us. We're like, we're just these weird people living on a planet.
19:30 Chuck Nice? I'm gonna say that's the one cool thing that I like about Star Wars when it comes to how they envision other worlds and galaxies, solar systems, is that often you're, they're going to a moon of a planet. They're not going to that planet. It's whatever system, but then where they're actually landing is a moon itself, you know?
19:50 Speaker 02 Yeah.
19:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I would also add that the host planet is gonna look way better in the sky.
19:56 Chuck Nice? Right.
19:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? From a moon than the moon is from the planet.
19:59 Speaker 02 True.
20:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just thought I'd tell you that.
20:01 Speaker 02 That's true, yeah.
20:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just imagine Saturn in the night sky, just looming large.
20:05 Chuck Nice? Wow.
20:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just that would just be totally cool.
20:08 Chuck Nice? That is cool.
20:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, I always wonder how history would be different had we, had that happened to us. Like, how would we discover the laws of physics differently, celestial mechanics, the Kepler's laws of motions? Would the presence of such a large body in our sky accelerate it? Would it decelerate it? Obviously, there's all this kind of radio stuff flying off Jupiter as well. Would that affect the technology we develop on our home planet, our home world even? So it's, it's, it's right for science fiction. That's why Star Wars has so much fun with it.
20:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So I think about it the opposite way, David. If we evolved on the surface of Venus, which is a very thick cloud cover, and it would just get, sort of get light in the day and dark at night, but you wouldn't know, how long, how much delayed would astronomy have been?
21:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because you'd have no idea what's going on outside of this fog.
21:03 Chuck Nice? And, and we would all have seasonal affective disorder. So, you know, it'd be like, look up, why, for what? So sad.
21:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, Chuck, keep him coming.
21:20 Chuck Nice? All right, let's go to Matthew Power. And what a great name, Matthew Power. Since some planets in our solar system have higher concentrations of certain elements, iron on Mars, for example, does that suggest our original solar nebula, once flattened by a centrifugal force, may have been ring-like with bands of certain elements that eventually formed the planets? Sort of a solar system-sized version of Saturn's rings?
21:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, I like that.
21:52 Chuck Nice? Wow.
21:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because that, that would mean that different places within the ring would coalesce to form a planet and, and have a very different concentration from other places in the disk. So how does that all land with you, David?
22:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's a really interesting question. In terms of iron abundance,
22:11 Speaker 02 I'm not, I'm actually, I've not heard that before, that Mars has a higher iron abundance than the Earth, especially.
22:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mercury wins.
22:16 Speaker 02 Mercury definitely does.
22:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Huge iron core, right?
22:20 Speaker 02 Usually the explanation we evoke for making sense of what's going with Mercury is, I mean, generally we kind of assume that all the planets formed with roughly the same amount of iron, at least in a relative sense compared to their mass. But Mercury does seem to have a lot more iron than the other planets in a relative sense. And so our explanation for that is that it was basically struck by many, many meteorites with such high velocities, such high energy, they actually chipped away the, the outer layer of Mercury. So it was once.
22:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you're saying it chips away pieces of Mercury that then just get jettisoned into the solar system?
22:54 Speaker 02 Correct, or even just vaporized to some degree from the impact and then, and then leaked off as, as vapor. That's also possible, so.
23:01 Chuck Nice? It's, it's like cosmic exfoliation.
23:04 Speaker 02 Very good, yeah. It's like a chemical peel.
23:09 Speaker 02 Almost for the planet. So that probably explains, we think, why Mercury has higher iron abundance. But generally, you assume that for the rest of the planets, it is uniform. And in fact, that is often treated as a default assumption when we look at other exoplanets. We assume that there's every single-
23:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You don't know for sure about Mars, though. You're not quite sure.
23:28 Speaker 02 I'm not sure. I've never heard that before. So I'd have to fact check that. That Mars, I always like to be honest when I've not heard something before. I've never heard the fact that Mars has a higher iron abundance than the Earth. I'd be somewhat surprised if it's true, because just from my expertise of looking at exoplanets, I know that many of my colleagues explicitly assume that iron abundance is uniform throughout any given solar system, with exceptions like Mercury.
23:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We can't deny Mars the fact that it's red because of iron in its outer crust. I mean, everywhere. That's pretty much just a rusty place.
24:01 Speaker 02 Right. But yeah, I think that's partly due to the unique history of that planet and its distinct chemical environment and the oxidation that happened on its surface.
24:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You said something, you implied something that I want to tease out. You implied something that I want to tease out here, because it's a very important scientific tool, really, that you can make a reasonable assumption about how much iron you'd expect in all of the planets, based on the iron that's in the Sun. Because the Sun has most of the mass of the solar system. Then, if the iron differs from that, you get to then look for an explanation for that.
24:38 Speaker 02 Correct.
24:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Which is a fascinating way to land on a new problem.
24:42 Speaker 02 Yes.
24:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right?
24:44 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, I think-
24:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We did that with the Moon. The Moon has hardly any iron.
24:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
24:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So how do you become an object that big with no iron? So then we looked and we thought about it, and then we came with the collision hypothesis for the Moon. So it's fun when something falls out of your expectations. You you get novel accountings for the.
25:06 Speaker 02 That's actually why I don't like this this strategy that many of my colleagues have of assuming explicitly that the iron abundance in the star is the same as the planets. Because, as you just pointed out, there's already two counterexamples right there. And there's there's probably even more throughout the solar system.
25:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, I get that, but if it is different, then you get to look for why it's different.
25:26 Speaker 02 True, but we in exoplanets, we have no way of directly measuring the iron. But it's at least not yet. I mean, I think the only way to do that would be if the if the planet was so hot, it was like Mustafar from Star Wars. It was like a lava world where the rock was literally gaseous. And then you could then you could infer the composition of of the rock from the atmosphere. But barring that, we have no way of measuring the chemical composition of what's inside an exoplanet.
25:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How about I O around Jupiter? Aren't there active volcanoes there? Could you get some?
25:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's a good example. So yeah, yeah, kind of like a Mustafi-ish type system, right? Where you have extreme volcanism, where you can spew up the gases. And then you get a chance of sampling what was inside.
26:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? OK.
26:06 Speaker 02 You need that, yeah.
26:07 Chuck Nice? Interesting.
26:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right.
26:08 Chuck Nice? That's that's pretty wild.
26:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, Chuck, give me another.
26:10 Chuck Nice? All right, all right.
26:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Blow them through these.
26:12 Chuck Nice? Let's let's continue forward. Here we go. Uh, this is Christian Holmes, who says, greeting Dr. Tyson and Professor Kipping. Quick question. What is the most extreme exoplanet that's been observed? Thank you, Christian from Pennsylvania. Now, Christian does not qualify the word extreme. So I don't know exactly what he means, but maybe David, you you can take liberty with that.
26:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? OK, I I'll let me sharpen that question and say, David, you presumably have catalogs of exoplanets now. There's more than 5,000. So presumably, they they line up with each other in ways that reveal similarities. Is there an outlier among the 5,000 that you that where nobody else looks like it?
27:08 Speaker 02 I think this, it's hard to pick on one. There's several planets which come to mind in this case. One is one I helped kind of discover its weirdness of. Immediately comes to mind because it got so much press attention when we released it. It's like 10 years ago now and it was called Trae's 2B. And we called it Erebus, the darkest world. Erebus was the god of darkness, I think in Greek mythology. Or maybe it was Roman mythology, but we called it that.
27:36 Chuck Nice? I'm gonna tell you the truth. David, you need to say it right. Tucker has to say it.
27:39 Speaker 02 Go ahead.
27:42 Speaker 02 Erebus. Erebus. Erebus. I like it. Yeah, you should do all the press work for that. Yeah, so this planet is darker than coal. It's darker than black paint. It reflects less light than basically any material you can come across.
28:01 Chuck Nice? Vantablack?
28:02 Speaker 02 Except for vantablack.
28:03 Chuck Nice? Except for vantablack, okay.
28:05 Speaker 02 But we don't know, it might be as dark as vantablack. We only have an upper limit on its darkness. So it might be even darker than vantablack as far as we can tell.
28:12 Chuck Nice? Wow. What is vantablack? It's the least reflective material that we know of to date. So it is, it has an albedo of nothing, no. Near zero, I guess. Almost zero. Wait, so David, if it doesn't reflect any light, how do you know it's there?
28:31 Speaker 02 From transit. It still casts a shadow. It still casts a shadow. So as it passes in front of the star, it still blocks that light.
28:37 Chuck Nice? Dope ass world.
28:40 Chuck Nice? That's what I'm talking about.
28:43 Speaker 02 Casts a shadow, but it's very dark. So when it passes around, when it passes in front of the star, it blocks out light. When it passes behind the star, we call that the occultation event. You get kind of a moment where you get to detect photons from the planet, light from the planet. So I can take a picture just here, just before the planet passes behind. And now I'm getting light from the planet and light from the star. And I take a photo of the two. And then I take a photo when it's behind. And now I've just got light from the star by itself. So subtract one from the other and you've got light from the planet in isolation.
29:18 Chuck Nice? That is brilliant.
29:18 Speaker 02 That's what we call occultation. So that's how we're able to tell that.
29:21 Chuck Nice? God, I gotta love science. I know. You gotta love it. I mean, who thinks of this crap? That's amazing.
29:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, by the way, just a small fact in there that it's very dangerous to subtract and explore the difference between two large numbers. So you're very... So David, your confidence in that, in those results, you have to, you have to be very sure that you're getting what you're looking for there.
29:54 Speaker 02 That's right, but it's not my first rodeo, Neil, so.
29:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
29:58 Speaker 02 Yeah. And it's been confirmed by others. Others after me published a subsequent work that did up the same result. So we feel pretty confident about that result.
30:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Chuck, you notice it's not him reconfirming his own results because what good would that be?
30:12 Chuck Nice? Right.
30:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The whole point of peer review and, and multiple studies, that's how science moves.
30:18 Chuck Nice? Science loves the haters, baby.
30:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, we do.
30:22 Chuck Nice? Science loves the haters. It's like, go ahead and hate on me.
30:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, they're not really haters. They're doing it out of love.
30:28 Chuck Nice? Of course. Of course they are.
30:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They will try to show you're wrong because they love you.
30:36 Speaker 02 There you go. Well, they love science.
30:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I love science.
30:39 Chuck Nice? Well, the truth is, in a way, it is kind of loving because in, in trying to show somebody's wrong, you end up confirming their work and that ends up showing them love. So, yeah.
30:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
30:50 Chuck Nice? So, cool. All right.
30:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, one more, Chuck, before we take our second break.
30:54 Chuck Nice? Okay, here we go. Long ago, I was impressed by a professional... Oh, this is Gene, and Gene is just Gene, okay? He goes, "Long ago, I was impressed by a professional astronomer who was studying eclipsing binary stars. I was and am amazed by how much info one can extract with careful measurements and clever bootstrapping. Now we are using the same techniques on exoplanets, and the James Webb Space Telescope adds spectral measurements of atmospheres. Could you give a brief summary of what and how we can get details from eclipsing systems?" So...
31:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yo, we're talking about all of it, not just one exo planet going in front of the star, but the whole system. The whole star system, alright, that's- That's a big question. However long it's gonna take him to answer, we don't have time in this segment. So let's take a break. When we come back, we'll get the full explanation of how the methods, tools and tactics of eclipsing binary stars have been lifted and adopted and modified in the service of David Kipping's dope-ass- Dope-ass world! Department, dope-ass world! When StarTalk Cosmic Queries continue.
32:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back, StarTalk Cosmic Queries, Cool Worlds Edition with David Kipping, who started his own Cool Worlds group at Columbia's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Columbia University, that is. David, you've got your, your, your successful and growing YouTube called Cool Worlds. What else? Tell me more about your social media footprint.
32:40 Speaker 02 The thing we're starting, and it's not, it's not live yet, is the Cool Worlds Podcast, which I've recorded, I think, seven episodes of. We have seven episodes in the, in the tank, and I'm just really excited to start sharing those. So as soon as we get that out, you can look on all the major platforms you get your podcast for, the Cool Worlds Podcast.
33:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Excellent, excellent. And you're on Twitter?
33:02 Speaker 02 Yes, David underscore Kipping is me on Twitter, yeah.
33:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so we left off, tell me the chap's name, Chuck? Gene! Gene, well, that could be a boy or girl. It could be. So we do not know the gender. So Gene wanted to know what methods, tools and tactics were borrowed from eclipsing binaries that to serve your cottage industry of, of Cool Worlds.
33:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, an enormous amount. I mean, there's in fact so many astronomers moved from that field of eclipsing binaries into the study of planets directly. That was the transition around the mid 90s when we first started finding planets. There's a really beautiful quote from Henry Norris Russell from 1953, I think he wrote this, that eclipses are the royal road to success. And they're kind of a shortcut. They provide you, it's almost like a cheat code in the universe. For some, for some reason, when these eclipses happen, it's possible to learn so much more about these planets than your technology would seem to enable. Like, we can measure potentially the existence of moons, as we've already talked about. You can measure the atmosphere of the planets. You could look for rings.
34:07 Speaker 02 You could even measure the blateness, whether it's spherical or football shaped of a planet from those light curves. You can measure the surface reflectivities. We've talked about these dark planets. There's an almost endless list of wonderful gems.
34:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The eclipses also enable you to see light from the star move through the atmosphere and then do spectroscopic studies.
34:30 Speaker 02 Correct. And that's what, of course, we're all excited about what JDVST is enabling. So essentially, when the planet passes in front, the same thing is the planet passing in front of the star, some of the light will, will hit the bulk of the planet, if you like, and it hit the solid surface. And that's never going to reach us. That's the shadow. But some of it will pass through the atmosphere. And if it passes through the atmosphere, only a fraction of it will reach us. And the fraction which reaches us will be different at different wavelengths, different colors. So our sky is blue. And so the Earth's atmosphere looks bigger in blue light. It scatters blue more than it scatters red. So an alien looking at the Earth and measuring our size would think that the Earth was a little bit bigger at blue wavelengths of light than it was in red wavelengths of light because of valley
35:15 Speaker 02 scattering, because our sky is blue. And then even you had to tell that from afar. And go a bit further, you can get the chemicals, you get oxygen, you can get carbon dioxide, nitrogen. So you can actually figure out a lot about an exoplanet.
35:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All from eclipses. Henry Norris Russell was at one point the chair of the Department of Astrophysics at Princeton University.
35:34 Speaker 02 That's right.
35:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Henry Norris Russell. And those, the real geeks out there might have heard of their Hertz-Brung-Russell diagram. That's the same Russell for that diagram. You can Google it. Hertz-Brung-Russell diagram. Yeah. HR diagram for short. The affectionate term for it. All right, cool. So Gene was right to realize that this trove of information brought to us from eclipsing binaries continues in the field of exoplanets whenever you have eclipses.
36:06 Speaker 02 There's a legacy, but it goes even beyond that. I mean, when you look at the theory that we borrowed from eclipsing binaries, and I studied this, like, Copal was one of the founders of understanding elliptical orbits and modeling the durations of the eclipses, the timing procession, the secular, all this kind of complicated celestial mechanics was all figured out for eclipsing binaries. So we took that and we still use it in exoplanets. But then we've gone further because, of course, we're measuring atmospheres, planetary atmospheres, and stars, they have atmospheres, but they're not nearly as interesting as the atmospheres of planets and all the rich chemical molecular chemistry that can happen inside them. So I'd say we-
36:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I don't think the stars would agree with you on that. I think they have, that you just distill atmospheres.
36:49 Speaker 02 I may be biased, but I do think planets are infinitely, infinitely more complex than- We actually understand stars far better than we understand planets. There's, we don't really understand what's going on inside most planets, or how their atmospheres work, how clouds work even on other planets. But, you know, we feel like we have a fairly good understanding of the interior of stars.
37:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, because clouds can be made of things other than water vapor, right?
37:15 Speaker 02 Right.
37:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
37:16 Speaker 02 Methane clouds, right?
37:18 Chuck Nice? Yeah. Which, by the way, I produce daily. Nah! Just in case anybody's wondering.
37:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, no smoking around, Chuck.
37:29 Chuck Nice? I am a fire hazard.
37:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, keep coming, Chuck.
37:35 Chuck Nice? All right, here we go. Um, here we go. This is Kyla Hunter. And Kyla says, hello, Dr. Tyson and Professor Kipping. Could the asteroid and Kuiper belts be considered rings of the sun? Hmm, so you got the asteroid belt, the Kuiper belt?
37:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, Saturn has rings, and it's flat, and it's all around. And so we got these two belts here. What are you thinking, David?
37:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, rocky rings, sure, you could call them that. I mean, it is possible that planets could have rocky rings. So if you're going to call rocky rings around planets rings, I don't see why you couldn't call rocky ring structures around stars the same thing. Sure, you know.
38:17 Speaker 02 It's the question is how concentrated does it get? Because normally they form almost like discs rather than or annuli. They're not often so narrow. So I guess it depends on your on your structure. There is actually an exoplanet that was discovered that has a ring system that forces us to tackle this weird thing of definition. It was discovered by the WASP survey. I think it was like J1407B was the name. And it has a ring system that is.
38:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, just WASP is is it's a planet survey, right?
38:51 Speaker 02 Correct. It's just small cameras. It's just small DSLR cameras.
38:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a consortium of small cameras. And what is the acronym? It's Wide Area Search for Planets, something like that.
39:02 Speaker 02 That sounds right. Yeah, I'm not even sure. We all call it WASP.
39:06 Chuck Nice? I was gonna say, I was gonna say, maybe they're just white cameras.
39:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? WASP cameras.
39:11 Chuck Nice? You know.
39:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's probably the acronyms. We all forget where they come from eventually.
39:16 Chuck Nice? Oh, dear. I believe we have to take some pictures now.
39:22 Chuck Nice? Gracious me, I must say. Shall we take the pictures and then retire to the study?
39:30 Chuck Nice? All right, sorry, go ahead.
39:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, this this particular planet discovered by WASP has this gigantic ring system that that is about the same. It's about one AU across. That's about the Earth's orbit around the Sun. It's like that's how large the ring structure around this exoplanet is. This is an exoplanet is very, very far from its star. And it has a gargantuan sized ring system. And there's huge cavities in it. And, you know, we're questioning.
39:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I've seen artist illustrations of this now that you're mentioning it. It's a stunning thing. How does it keep a stable ring while it's orbiting the star?
40:09 Speaker 02 It's very, we don't even know if it is orbiting the star. There's only one eclipse of this thing ever seen, which is where the evidence for the rings come from. It may not, it may have just been a chance coincidence that it passed in front of a star. And it was free floating, as far as we know.
40:23 Chuck Nice? Okay.
40:23 Speaker 02 It could be brown dwarf, it could even be a small star perhaps. So there's a, there's an awful lot we don't know about this particular case. We just have this one snapshot for this rich apparent like ring system. And that's a good point where we don't know, it's so different to Saturn. What do you call that? Is it a planetary ring system? Or is it a circumplanetary disk? Which is a high, a completely different category normally of, of how we think about these things that evolve around planets. So when Jupiter, when it formed its moons, probably at one point had a disk around it. And from that disk formed the moons. Is this something like that? Or is it more like something, like an ancient ring system, more similar to Saturn? And so, uh, it's hard, classification is hard.
41:05 Speaker 02 And I, if you want to classify the, the, you know, the asteroid belt that way, I, I wouldn't dismiss it. Yeah, I think that's a fair way to call it.
41:13 Chuck Nice? Okay, cool. Cool. Okay. All right, Chuck, we got time for a few more. Okay, let's go with Alan Rayer.
41:22 Chuck Nice? What are the major interesting astronomical events that we can expect with respect to exoplanets for the coming year? I'd love that. Yeah, uh huh, uh huh. And then he says, uh, hi, I'm from Lithuania. Chuck, you probably already killed my last name. But, and you're probably right, but you didn't give me a phonetic spelling, so. You're, you're. So give it, give us that last name. You're Alan Rayer or Rayer, R A Y E R. R A Y E R? Yeah. Rayer. Rayer, Rayer, one or the other. But, but what's, what's coming down the pike? Dr. Kipping, what, what, what can we look forward to that's might be exciting? More space missions or just you guys on earth?
42:06 Speaker 02 I'm excited. Let's see why I'm excited about this. Obviously, JDUST is in the sky observing exoplanets right now, and it's observing Trappist One, which is one of the most fascinating exopatric systems we've ever discovered. It probably won't be sensitive enough to detect signs of life on those planets, but it could perhaps tell us whether these planets have an atmosphere that is similar. And these are rocky planets in the hapless zone of their stars. It could tell us whether these planets have an atmosphere similar to a primordial Earth when the Earth was first born. It was probably a CO2-rich atmosphere. It could detect that quite easily. It could detect a methane-rich atmosphere. It probably can't go all the way to detecting oxygen on these planets, but it's going to be our first glimpse of the chemical
42:49 Speaker 02 composition of a habitable rocky planet's atmosphere. And that's going to come in the next year, two years from JDUST.
42:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, how many? Isn't that a multi-planet system? How many planets are in that?
43:01 Speaker 02 There's seven, at least seven.
43:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Crazy.
43:04 Speaker 02 In fact, slightly sub-Earth-sized planets in that system. The seven dwarfs, they're all packed very, very close to this M-dwarf, all within the orbit of Mercury, I think, or seven of them. So very, very compact system.
43:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow.
43:16 Speaker 02 So that's very exciting. Then we have Plato, which is a European mission, which is coming down the pipe. I think that's sort of...
43:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Plato?
43:23 Speaker 02 Plato, yeah, after the philosopher. So that's in 2026, I think. We're expecting a launch. That's like a super Kepler or even a super TESS. These are two missions which NASA launched to hunt for a planet by eclipses. Plato is doing the same thing on steroids. And then down the road from that, we have W1st, which is this old spy satellite which was given to NASA, and it's basically a Hubble-sized mirror that the NSA were just like, "We don't need this anymore because it's such old technology. You can have it and do something with it." So we've repurposed it and launching it as basically a Hubble-class telescope that will do all sorts of stuff, including some exoplanet
44:05 Speaker 02 science, using a technique called gravitational microlensing. So it should find...
44:11 Speaker 02 Thousands of objects using this technique. So we're very excited about that. And then, of course, you've got Vera Rubin, formerly known as LSST, which is not really an exoplanet mission per se, but I think it could do some interesting things in terms of detecting planets around white dwarf stars. So the sun will eventually become a white dwarf star when it dies. And LSST, we wrote a paper about that in my team, we think could be the perfect telescope to detect thousands of rocky planets, even smaller than that, even asteroid-sized things, around these white dwarfs.
44:43 Chuck Nice? Well, you know what? That brings us to Captain James Riley, who, just as a perfect follow-up to everything you just said, if we found biosignatures on an exoplanet, what would be our next course of action, considering they're so far away?
44:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I like it.
44:59 Chuck Nice? So what do you do? You're the dog that caught the car.
45:03 Speaker 02 So the immediate reaction I would have, the immediate reaction I have would be skepticism, because I think we're all going to be dubious. So the first fact is, is it real? Because we had a biosignature detection already on Venus, right? Remember that? There was phosphine claimed on Venus. And that's the reaction that played out after that is probably similar to the reaction that will play out for an exoplanet. Obviously, it's a very, we can actually visit Venus. We could actually potentially go there and do a better job. But the skepticism
45:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In your lifetime.
45:34 Speaker 02 That happened, I think, will be similar to the skepticism that happens with an exoplanet claim.
45:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, just in all fairness to the Venus skepticism, that would have been life somehow thriving in Venus's atmosphere, whereas these other signatures would presumably indicate surface life.
45:53 Speaker 02 Also, I mean, we won't even know. I mean, if we detect a biosignature, we don't know where that life is. It could be in the ocean and the gases come out. It could be on the surface. It could be some kind of whale that floats through the clouds. You know, there's, we just, there's no way of telling from the gases alone.
46:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? An air whale.
46:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, I love it. Knock yourself out. You can have any kind of life you want.
46:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Floating device, yeah.
46:15 Speaker 02 And in fact, it might not. So the two questions, is it really, is the signal real? Can another team get it? Which has obviously been some problems with Venus with phosphine. And then two, even if it is real, does that actually mean it's life? Because there are ways that nature can produce biosignatures without biology and just, and just trip you up.
46:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh.
46:36 Speaker 02 So there'll be a, there'll be a decade of arguing and follow-up observations and debates, and it'll get heated, people trying to figure out what's really going on. And there'll be some false starts. I guarantee you, there'll be several biosignature claims that will just not be real. But that's okay. That's how science works. Science works through, we're not dogmatic. It's corrected. We're allowed to make mistakes and fix it, and that's, that's science at its healthiest. So just expect that down the road. But eventually, yeah, it would be great if we could one day start imaging these planets, maybe building something like Louvoir or Habeck's that people have been talking about, these kind of supersized telescopes that could image the pale blue dots from many light years away.
47:19 Speaker 02 You know, achieve Sagan's dream of a pale blue dot from, from across an entirely different star system. And then after that, we'll be trying to just learn more and more about it. Does it have moons? You know, what's, what's the continental structure like? How much water does it have? We'll do as much as we can remotely. And perhaps in the distant future, we might be able to send something. But it's, it's certainly not something within our capabilities in the near future.
47:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Hmm. Yeah. All right, Chuck, I don't know if we have time for any more. I think we're done here.
47:49 Chuck Nice? Oh, man.
47:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let me check that. Yeah, yeah, we're done.
47:51 Chuck Nice? Oh, well. Oh, well.
47:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're done, but I think.
47:54 Chuck Nice? We got a lot, lot, lot more questions might have to come and do a part two, like.
48:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
48:01 Speaker 02 Happy to do so, yeah, guys.
48:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You have fulfilled our expectation that these are dope-ass worlds.
48:06 Chuck Nice? Yes.
48:10 Speaker 02 We'll have to rename the, you know, have to rename the whole team, I think, after this.
48:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Dope-ass world, dope-ass world. All right, David, great to know you're just up the street from us.
48:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Columbia University. Chuck, good to have you, man.
48:21 Chuck Nice? Always a pleasure.
48:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking out.
Previous Cosmic Queries – Volcanoes & Life in the Universe Next Cosmic Queries – The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies with Charles Liu Page updated September 28, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
