Meet the Third Ever (!!) Interstellar Comet

A rare visitor from another star system has been spotted: the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS! It was detected July 1 by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS. Most known comets orbit the Sun and are bound by the gravity of the solar system ... but this object came from far beyond the pull of our Sun, traveling 137,000 miles per hour from another star. Now, scientists are racing to get a good image of it, in the hopes it can answer big questions like: What is the universe like where this comet is from? Is the solar system we live in unique? Want us to cover more space news? Tell us by emailing [email protected] mailto:[email protected]! We'd love to know what you want to hear from us. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:21Regina Barber?

  Hey, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here. And Emily Kwong. With our biweekly Science News roundup, featuring the hosts of All Things Considered. And today, one of our favorites, Ari Shapiro.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  One of your four favorites.

• 0:33Regina Barber?

  One of our four favorites.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  I'm excited to hear about our new interstellar visitor. I've been dreaming up names for him or her or them.

• 0:41Regina Barber?

  We also got news about a plastic eating worm that could revolutionize recycling. And new research on how some animals' sense of smell varies by altitude.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  Nothing to sniff at.

• 0:52Regina Barber?

  All of that on this episode of Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 0:59Speaker 03

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• 2:01Speaker 02

  Let's start with the interstellar visitor. Please tell me he has big eyes and a glowing finger.

• 2:06Regina Barber?

  I wish. No, it's a comet, and most comets orbit our sun. You know, they're bound by our solar system. But this one came in 137,000 miles per hour from another star, and it's incredibly rare to get visitors like this.

• 2:19Emily Kwong?

  Yes, this comet's coming in hot, and astronomers spotted it. It's dubbed 3I Atlas on July 1st using the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS. This is a network of four telescopes, and the telescope in Chile caught this comet.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  You both sound very blasé about this comet traveling 137,000 miles an hour that was caught by the last alert system. Should we be ducking for cover?

• 2:44Regina Barber?

  So, no, we should not be ducking for cover. There's nothing to fear. Astronomers are guessing it'll stay roughly like 150 million miles from Earth. That's about like one and a half times the distance from Earth to the Sun, so it's really far. It will come kind of close to Mars, though.

• 2:59Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, so no dinosaur fate for us.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Okay. You said these kinds of visitors are rare. How many have we seen before?

• 3:05Emily Kwong?

  So, this is only the third confirmed interstellar object to have zoomed past Earth. The first one was in 2017. You may remember "a muamua," which means "a messenger from afar arriving first" in Hawaiian. Yeah, there was all this public controversy at the time that maybe it was a spaceship?

• 3:23Speaker 05

  People continue to debate this today, right? We don't really know, and the fact that we only had two or three weeks to study that object should tell you something about why.

• 3:31Regina Barber?

  Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of astronomers don't think it's a spaceship, but we don't really know too much about it. That was planetary astronomer Teddy Coretta, who studies comets and the past interstellar objects. He says this comet, 3I Atlas, will be here for longer, though.

• 3:44Speaker 05

  We haven't seen this object before. We'll have a couple of months to study it for real, and then it's gone forever.

• 3:50Regina Barber?

  Teddy says studying these objects can help answer this big question: is our solar system unique or not? This comet most likely formed with planets around another faraway star, so studying it might tell us something about how other solar systems are made and how planets form there.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Cool. So scientists are gonna have a couple of months to study it. What about amateur astronomers? Will we be able to see it in the night sky?

• 4:11Emily Kwong?

  Yes, Ari, you, our listeners, in October, when the comet gets closer to Earth, if you venture somewhere far, far away from city lights.

• 4:21Speaker 05

  Under dark skies with a big telescope and some patience, maybe you might be able to see it. That might be the first time anyone has actually seen the light from an interstellar object with their own eyes.

• 4:30Regina Barber?

  So come October, I'll be trying to spot it.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Sounds amazing. Okay, next up, plastic eating worms. Where do they come from?

• 4:39Regina Barber?

  Yeah, they're called wax worms, and they're larvae of wax moths. And they're these little white caterpillars that chew through beeswax.

• 4:46Emily Kwong?

  And more than a decade ago, this beekeeper in Europe, who happens to be a scientist, was cleaning out her beehives, and she put the wax worms in a plastic bag. And when she got home, she realized the worms had eaten through the bag, all on their own.

• 4:59Regina Barber?

  What?

• 5:00Emily Kwong?

  And this intrigues scientists like Brian Cassoni at Canada's Brandon University.

• 5:04Speaker 06

  There wasn't anything known about how the wax worm is eating plastic, how much plastic they eat. Do they metabolize the plastic? Can this actually be used in plastic remediation?

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Remediation meaning, don't let the plastic sit in a landfill for 200 years? Like, are these worms the solution?

• 5:20Emily Kwong?

  Okay, so yeah, that is the enticing question. Brian experimented with it. He fed the worms a diet of polyethylene. That's the world's most commonly manufactured form of plastic. Usually, polyethylene, to your point, takes decades or even centuries to decompose. But Brian found...

• 5:36Speaker 06

  It takes about 2,000 or so wax worms to fully consume a plastic bag in about 24 hours. And then we went into, well, how's that being done? So we looked at the bacteria, and we were able to isolate plastic degrading bacteria from their guts.

• 5:51Regina Barber?

  So his preliminary results suggest that the worms break down the plastic into fatty acids. They metabolize it into energy, and whatever's left over gets stored as fat.

• 6:00Emily Kwong?

  There's just one problem.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  No, what's the problem?

• 6:03Speaker 06

  When you feed them just on plastic, they die, usually within a few days. So that's not good.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  No, that's not good.

• 6:11Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, it's not a renewable recycling system, it seems.

• 6:14Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so Brian and his team figured out if you feed these worms a supplemented diet, like you throw in some carbs, some protein, along with the plastic, that could help the wax worms live like longer, healthier lives. And he presented his research this week at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Belgium.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  So what's the next step? Do I get to feed my plastic bags to worms?

• 6:36Emily Kwong?

  Well, one cool possibility, scientists are working on a way to isolate these worms' saliva and gut bacteria, so they can just use the enzymes produced by these worms to directly break down plastics. Wouldn't that be cool? Yeah.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, amazing. Okay, continuing with our critter theme, the third story is about animals that live at high altitudes. How high are we talking?

• 6:58Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, we're talking about animals that live 1,000 meters above sea level, so higher than 3,000 feet, you can picture Table Mountain in South Africa, or Mount Diablo in California.

• 7:09Regina Barber?

  Yeah, all kinds of animals have adapted to live at this altitude or higher, sink like bighorn sheep, alpaca, Andean guinea pigs. Where they live, they're, as you probably know, there are fewer air molecules.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Right, you hike up a mountain and you get out of breath because of the low oxygen.

• 7:24Regina Barber?

  Right, the air is thinner, drier. So Ali Graham, a biologist at the University of Kansas, wanted to know how these conditions impacted the animals' evolution. And she pursued this question by looking at genetic, open source data.

• 7:36Speaker 07

  I wanted to let, like I said, the data tell me what the story was, rather than me like trying to for, you know, like have any control over that.

• 7:45Emily Kwong?

  She essentially screened the genomes of 27 different high-altitude species and compared them to their low-altitude relatives. So she compared rabbits that live at low altitude with pika that live at high altitude. These two lineages diverged several million years ago.

• 8:00Regina Barber?

  And Ali did see a pattern. She and her team published their findings in the journal Current Biology this month.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  OK, so drumroll, what did she find? What's the pattern?

• 8:10Regina Barber?

  Yeah, she saw like a big reduction in genes related to smell, like nearly a quarter of these species' smell receptor genes were turned off. And Ali also saw a reduction in the part of the brain associated with smell.

• 8:23Emily Kwong?

  Maybe because it was better to invest genetic resources in taste or vision, though far more work is needed to be done to determine what ultimately drove this evolutionary mechanism.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is not what I expected you to say. Fewer smell receptors? Would the same be true for humans at high altitudes?

• 8:38Regina Barber?

  So interestingly, no. Like, researchers compared the genomes of Tibetans, who traditionally have lived at high altitudes, with Han Chinese people, who traditionally live at like lower altitudes. And looking at just their genetics, found like no olfactory changes, none of these like genes differences.

• 8:54Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, Ali suspects it's because these groups haven't been separated long enough for a genetic signature related to smell to pop up.

• 9:02Speaker 07

  But at the same time, I like half joke, like, well, we'll check back in a couple million years and see whether or not that signal has popped up in human populations, right?

• 9:11Speaker 02

  And if it has, we'll report on it.

• 9:12Emily Kwong?

  Absolutely. And in the meantime, Zach Chevron, a biologist at the University of Montana, who was not a part of the study, says a nice follow up. We'll be to go into the mountains and test the nose power of these animals directly.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Fieldwork you can smell. I love it.

• 9:25Regina Barber?

  Yep. Ari, thank you so much for hanging out with us.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Always a pleasure.

• 9:30Emily Kwong?

  That is Ari Shapiro. You can hear more of his work on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast, all about what the news means for you.

• 9:38Regina Barber?

  This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and Jason Fuller. It was edited by Christopher and Taliata.

• 9:44Emily Kwong?

  Tyler Jones checked the facts. Ted Mebane and Tiffany Baracastro were the audio engineers. I'm Emily Kwong.

• 9:49Regina Barber?

  And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.