Cosmic Queries – Cool Worlds with David Kipping

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.

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

• 0:01Neil 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.

• 0:26Chuck Nice?

  They love it.

• 0:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They love it.

• 0:28Chuck Nice?

  They love it.

• 0:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They just love it.

• 0:31Chuck Nice?

  Inquiring minds want to know.

• 0:33Neil 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.

• 0:47Chuck Nice?

  Yay.

• 0:48Neil 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?

• 1:08Chuck Nice?

  A little brag, a little brag there, a little humble brag.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A little humble brag.

• 1:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we deal with the cool worlds, baby.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  David, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:17Speaker 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.

• 1:29Chuck Nice?

  Welcome to dope ass planets.

• 1:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You wanna be one of us. You wish you could.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Only some get it on.

• 1:40Neil 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.

• 1:49Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep it coming.

• 1:51Speaker 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.

• 1:57Chuck Nice?

  David, David, David.

• 2:00Chuck 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.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no.

• 2:14Chuck Nice?

  We see the Superman swoop.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  That's just this camera. That's just this camera.

• 2:19Chuck Nice?

  Okay, we see it, David. We, we, we understand when, when you're the boy band.

• 2:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Across the forehead.

• 2:25Chuck Nice?

  When you're the boy band of physics.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  There's a lot of filters happening here to make this happen.

• 2:31Neil 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.

• 2:42Chuck Nice?

  Man, nice.

• 2:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, there it is. They're crazy.

• 2:46Chuck Nice?

  I tried to, I tried to create a YouTube show on, um, Cheetos and Couch Dwelling.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Didn't work out. Not quite a million views yet.

• 2:57Chuck Nice?

  Not quite a million views, but.

• 2:59Neil 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?

• 3:10Speaker 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.

• 3:42Chuck Nice?

  Cool is a relative term, so what would cool be? Like?

• 3:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, quantify this.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  We're deliberately vague in that sense, so.

• 3:51Speaker 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.

• 4:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but you're counting, right, you're counting Earth as being far away from the sun.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  In this, in this, in this picture. It's a cool world in this picture.

• 4:24Chuck Nice?

  We would be, yeah.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so, so why do we have so many exoplanets that are so close to their host star?

• 4:32Speaker 02

  That's just detection bias, unfortunately. I mean, I wish it wasn't true.

• 4:36Neil 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.

• 4:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 4:44Neil 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.

• 4:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we're, we're, we're used to it happening at a traffic stop.

• 4:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly. So tell, tell us what you mean by a detection bias.

• 5:00Speaker 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.

• 5:26Chuck Nice?

  Oh, right.

• 5:27Speaker 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.

• 5:41Neil 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.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Unfortunately for me, I mean, some folks are fascinated by those hot planets. I, I'm obviously more interested in the cooler objects.

• 6:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the possibility of life, ultimately.

• 6:05Speaker 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.

• 6:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So first, tell everyone what the archive is, and then tell us everyone about Trojan. Trojan objects.

• 6:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 6:27Speaker 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.

• 6:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Racetrack style.

• 6:54Speaker 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.

• 7:03Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha. Gotcha.

• 7:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. And so then you said something about exo moons?

• 7:10Speaker 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.

• 7:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the kaboodle, that's why they're cool stars.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Exactly. Cool worlds. Yeah.

• 7:23Chuck Nice?

  Cool worlds.

• 7:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry. Cool worlds.

• 7:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So Chuck, you got questions for this man?

• 7:28Chuck Nice?

  I do. As usual. So let's jump right into it.

• 7:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, just to be clear, these are Patreon members who have at least the minimum membership level.

• 7:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which we reduced.

• 7:39Chuck Nice?

  Yes. We, we dropped it down to five dollars to give you no excuse.

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Five dollars. Now you got no damn excuse.

• 7:44Chuck Nice?

  You got no excuse. You know.

• 7:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Five dollars a month.

• 7:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you get to ask questions. Okay.

• 7:49Chuck 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?

• 8:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love that.

• 8:05Chuck 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?

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  There's a correlation.

• 8:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sun is a planet around a bigger star.

• 8:20Speaker 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.

• 8:49Neil 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?

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:58Neil 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.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By spooning matter into it. And the extra gravity actually compresses the gas.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More than it otherwise would.

• 9:14Speaker 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.

• 9:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you've been spooning more and more mass onto it, so therefore the pressures down in the middle keep going up.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 9:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 9:53Speaker 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.

• 10:11Neil 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.

• 10:43Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 10:44Neil 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.

• 10:51Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we were Jupiterarians, we could feel the same way and kick Earth out and we'd have no recourse.

• 10:57Chuck Nice?

  Right, cuz, yeah. But, but also size does matter, uh, so Pluto, Pluto screwed you.

• 11:04Speaker 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.

• 11:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, then it puffs up.

• 11:12Speaker 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.

• 11:24Chuck Nice?

  So, so, so a tad under twice the size of Jupiter is kind of our limits for planets, no matter where they are.

• 11:34Speaker 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.

• 11:47Chuck 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.

• 11:59Speaker 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.

• 12:43Speaker 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.

• 12:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But then what right would you have to call it a planet?

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Just that that's for I really don't care about the naming.

• 12:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a gathering of mass over here.

• 13:02Speaker 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.

• 13:13Neil 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.

• 13:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool worlds among the exoplanets in our galaxy when StarTalk returns.

• 13:45Speaker 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.

• 14:07Neil 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?

• 14:24Speaker 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.

• 14:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So this you just you just invented this out of whole cloth?

• 14:39Speaker 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.

• 14:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what's the name of your channel?

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Just Cool Worlds. That's it.

• 14:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just Cool Worlds.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  I wasn't very creative. I had this one great idea for a name, and I just kept using it.

• 14:59Neil 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?

• 15:15Chuck Nice?

  Yep, let's do it from Patreon. This is Richard Hart and Richard says, Richard here from Elk Grove, California.

• 15:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Elk Grove?

• 15:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Looking at-

• 15:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That sounds wealthy, doesn't it? Doesn't that sound wealthy?

• 15:27Chuck 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?

• 15:49Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 15:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're the Bloods from Elk Grove.

• 15:53Chuck Nice?

  That's right. We're the Elk Grove Bloods. That's right.

• 15:58Chuck 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-

• 16:08Chuck Nice?

  You Crips, you. Or we'll give you a stern looking at.

• 16:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, that's the seeds of a whole sitcom, you realize?

• 16:22Chuck 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?"

• 16:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, I like that.

• 16:53Chuck Nice?

  That's a good question and it kinda makes sense the way he poses it.

• 16:58Speaker 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.

• 17:19Neil 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.

• 17:26Speaker 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.

• 18:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's even correcting for the observer's bias?

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Correct. Half of all stars have gaseous planets in the habitable zone, which obviously don't have solid surfaces.

• 18:21Neil 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?

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 18:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my God, that's a whole other.

• 18:35Speaker 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.

• 18:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Telescope designed specifically for these discoveries.

• 18:46Speaker 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.

• 19:06Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 19:07Neil 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.

• 19:14Speaker 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?

• 19:25Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  That's why they're not interested in us. We're like, we're just these weird people living on a planet.

• 19:30Chuck 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?

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would also add that the host planet is gonna look way better in the sky.

• 19:56Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From a moon than the moon is from the planet.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  True.

• 20:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just thought I'd tell you that.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  That's true, yeah.

• 20:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just imagine Saturn in the night sky, just looming large.

• 20:05Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 20:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just that would just be totally cool.

• 20:08Chuck Nice?

  That is cool.

• 20:09Speaker 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.

• 20:41Neil 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?

• 21:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you'd have no idea what's going on outside of this fog.

• 21:03Chuck Nice?

  And, and we would all have seasonal affective disorder. So, you know, it'd be like, look up, why, for what? So sad.

• 21:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, keep him coming.

• 21:20Chuck 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?

• 21:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I like that.

• 21:52Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 21:52Neil 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?

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a really interesting question. In terms of iron abundance,

• 22:11Speaker 02

  I'm not, I'm actually, I've not heard that before, that Mars has a higher iron abundance than the Earth, especially.

• 22:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mercury wins.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  Mercury definitely does.

• 22:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Huge iron core, right?

• 22:20Speaker 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.

• 22:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're saying it chips away pieces of Mercury that then just get jettisoned into the solar system?

• 22:54Speaker 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.

• 23:01Chuck Nice?

  It's, it's like cosmic exfoliation.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Very good, yeah. It's like a chemical peel.

• 23:09Speaker 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-

• 23:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't know for sure about Mars, though. You're not quite sure.

• 23:28Speaker 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.

• 23:51Neil 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.

• 24:01Speaker 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.

• 24:12Neil 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.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 24:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is a fascinating way to land on a new problem.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right?

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I think-

• 24:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We did that with the Moon. The Moon has hardly any iron.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:50Neil 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.

• 25:06Speaker 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.

• 25:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I get that, but if it is different, then you get to look for why it's different.

• 25:26Speaker 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.

• 25:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How about I O around Jupiter? Aren't there active volcanoes there? Could you get some?

• 25:56Speaker 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.

• 26:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  OK.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  You need that, yeah.

• 26:07Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 26:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 26:08Chuck Nice?

  That's that's pretty wild.

• 26:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, give me another.

• 26:10Chuck Nice?

  All right, all right.

• 26:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Blow them through these.

• 26:12Chuck 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.

• 26:41Neil 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?

• 27:08Speaker 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.

• 27:36Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna tell you the truth. David, you need to say it right. Tucker has to say it.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Go ahead.

• 27:42Speaker 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.

• 28:01Chuck Nice?

  Vantablack?

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Except for vantablack.

• 28:03Chuck Nice?

  Except for vantablack, okay.

• 28:05Speaker 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.

• 28:12Chuck 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?

• 28:31Speaker 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.

• 28:37Chuck Nice?

  Dope ass world.

• 28:40Chuck Nice?

  That's what I'm talking about.

• 28:43Speaker 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.

• 29:18Chuck Nice?

  That is brilliant.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  That's what we call occultation. So that's how we're able to tell that.

• 29:21Chuck Nice?

  God, I gotta love science. I know. You gotta love it. I mean, who thinks of this crap? That's amazing.

• 29:32Neil 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.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  That's right, but it's not my first rodeo, Neil, so.

• 29:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 29:58Speaker 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.

• 30:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, you notice it's not him reconfirming his own results because what good would that be?

• 30:12Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The whole point of peer review and, and multiple studies, that's how science moves.

• 30:18Chuck Nice?

  Science loves the haters, baby.

• 30:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, we do.

• 30:22Chuck Nice?

  Science loves the haters. It's like, go ahead and hate on me.

• 30:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, they're not really haters. They're doing it out of love.

• 30:28Chuck Nice?

  Of course. Of course they are.

• 30:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They will try to show you're wrong because they love you.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  There you go. Well, they love science.

• 30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love science.

• 30:39Chuck 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.

• 30:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 30:50Chuck Nice?

  So, cool. All right.

• 30:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, one more, Chuck, before we take our second break.

• 30:54Chuck 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...

• 31:29Neil 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.

• 32:15Neil 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.

• 32:40Speaker 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.

• 33:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. And you're on Twitter?

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Yes, David underscore Kipping is me on Twitter, yeah.

• 33:05Neil 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.

• 33:24Speaker 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.

• 34:07Speaker 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.

• 34:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The eclipses also enable you to see light from the star move through the atmosphere and then do spectroscopic studies.

• 34:30Speaker 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

• 35:15Speaker 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.

• 35:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All from eclipses. Henry Norris Russell was at one point the chair of the Department of Astrophysics at Princeton University.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 35:35Neil 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.

• 36:06Speaker 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-

• 36:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think the stars would agree with you on that. I think they have, that you just distill atmospheres.

• 36:49Speaker 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.

• 37:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because clouds can be made of things other than water vapor, right?

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Methane clouds, right?

• 37:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Which, by the way, I produce daily. Nah! Just in case anybody's wondering.

• 37:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, no smoking around, Chuck.

• 37:29Chuck Nice?

  I am a fire hazard.

• 37:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, keep coming, Chuck.

• 37:35Chuck 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?

• 37:52Neil 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?

• 37:59Speaker 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.

• 38:17Speaker 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.

• 38:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, just WASP is is it's a planet survey, right?

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Correct. It's just small cameras. It's just small DSLR cameras.

• 38:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a consortium of small cameras. And what is the acronym? It's Wide Area Search for Planets, something like that.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  That sounds right. Yeah, I'm not even sure. We all call it WASP.

• 39:06Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, I was gonna say, maybe they're just white cameras.

• 39:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  WASP cameras.

• 39:11Chuck Nice?

  You know.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's probably the acronyms. We all forget where they come from eventually.

• 39:16Chuck Nice?

  Oh, dear. I believe we have to take some pictures now.

• 39:22Chuck Nice?

  Gracious me, I must say. Shall we take the pictures and then retire to the study?

• 39:30Chuck Nice?

  All right, sorry, go ahead.

• 39:34Speaker 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.

• 39:59Neil 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?

• 40:09Speaker 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.

• 40:23Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 40:23Speaker 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.

• 41:05Speaker 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.

• 41:13Chuck Nice?

  Okay, cool. Cool. Okay. All right, Chuck, we got time for a few more. Okay, let's go with Alan Rayer.

• 41:22Chuck 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?

• 42:06Speaker 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

• 42:49Speaker 02

  composition of a habitable rocky planet's atmosphere. And that's going to come in the next year, two years from JDUST.

• 42:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, how many? Isn't that a multi-planet system? How many planets are in that?

• 43:01Speaker 02

  There's seven, at least seven.

• 43:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Crazy.

• 43:04Speaker 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.

• 43:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 43:16Speaker 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...

• 43:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plato?

• 43:23Speaker 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

• 44:05Speaker 02

  science, using a technique called gravitational microlensing. So it should find...

• 44:11Speaker 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.

• 44:43Chuck 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?

• 44:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like it.

• 44:59Chuck Nice?

  So what do you do? You're the dog that caught the car.

• 45:03Speaker 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

• 45:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In your lifetime.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  That happened, I think, will be similar to the skepticism that happens with an exoplanet claim.

• 45:38Neil 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.

• 45:53Speaker 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.

• 46:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An air whale.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I love it. Knock yourself out. You can have any kind of life you want.

• 46:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Floating device, yeah.

• 46:15Speaker 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.

• 46:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 46:36Speaker 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.

• 47:19Speaker 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.

• 47:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm. Yeah. All right, Chuck, I don't know if we have time for any more. I think we're done here.

• 47:49Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man.

• 47:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me check that. Yeah, yeah, we're done.

• 47:51Chuck Nice?

  Oh, well. Oh, well.

• 47:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're done, but I think.

• 47:54Chuck Nice?

  We got a lot, lot, lot more questions might have to come and do a part two, like.

• 48:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  Happy to do so, yeah, guys.

• 48:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have fulfilled our expectation that these are dope-ass worlds.

• 48:06Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  We'll have to rename the, you know, have to rename the whole team, I think, after this.

• 48:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dope-ass world, dope-ass world. All right, David, great to know you're just up the street from us.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Columbia University. Chuck, good to have you, man.

• 48:21Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 48:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking out.