Cosmic Queries – ‘Oumuamua

Since passing through our solar system in 2017, ‘Oumuamua has been a hot topic of conversation for astronomers. Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Chuck Nice answer fan-submitted Cosmic Queries about ‘Oumuamua with cosmochemist Natalie Starkey.

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.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Cosmic Queries Edition. And I got my co-host Chuck Nice, Chuck. Hey Neil, what's happening? Always good to have you Chuck, it's nice to have you. It's always a pleasure to be here. So today we're gonna talk about Oumuamua. Oumuamua? Is that a new Disney film? Oumuamua? What? And I only know about it from just what I've read, I don't think much beyond that about it. So we bring in one of our experts at large. Of course, we've got Natalie Starkey. Natalie, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 0:48Natalie Starkey?

  Hi Neil, hi Chuck. It's really good to be back, nice to see you both again.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice to see you. And you're an expert on like stuff that's not planets in a solar system. Is that a fair characterization?

• 0:59Natalie Starkey?

  I know a fair amount about planets, but yeah, I like comets and asteroids. I like the smaller bits and bobs of the solar system.

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The stuff that could render us extinct one day?

• 1:09Natalie Starkey?

  Maybe, but hopefully not. If we know enough about these things.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if there's a comet Natalie headed towards Earth, that's not good for you if that happens?

• 1:21Natalie Starkey?

  No, that wouldn't be great. But actually, if we could divert it away from Earth and then get a sample of it and bring it back for all the scientists who want to study these things, then that would be great.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, so you're going beyond Bruce Willis. You don't just wanna save the Earth, you wanna get some science done while you're doing it.

• 1:37Natalie Starkey?

  Why not? You know, we might as well. You know, there's enough of us here doing this science that I think, yeah, we could learn an awful lot if we could actually go grab some sample.

• 1:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  While you save humanity and civilization, can you bring back a sample for my land?

• 1:55Chuck Nice?

  It's a bit of a different movie.

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a different movie. That's a completely different movie. So Natalie, you you have the title of cosmochemist. I didn't even know you could have that title. And how many other people know that that's even a title or something to aspire to who are in school?

• 2:11Natalie Starkey?

  And you know what I didn't know it was something you could do when I was younger. I had no idea. And I actually went through my degrees, which were in geology, and then ended up doing a PhD in, again, in geochemistry, essentially, looking at volcanoes, old volcanoes in the Arctic. And then it was doing after that, when I became kind of what I would consider a proper scientist, where I'm working for money and I'm getting paid to do science, that I became a cosmochemist because I just turned my geochemistry into studying rocks from space. So I was looking at, you know, comets.

• 2:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got bored with Earth. You just say it. You got bored with Earth.

• 2:47Natalie Starkey?

  Well, you know, there's only so much you can do with Earth. No, no, I absolutely love Earth. And volcanoes are like my absolute passion. But, yeah, I, when I saw this job advertised that was working on samples from the Stardust mission, which was a NASA mission to collect samples from a comet, I was absolutely fascinated. So it was a steep learning curve for me because I'd never studied asteroids or comets or anything like that before. But essentially, the rocks are all the same. You you look at Earth rocks, you look at space rocks, they all contain the same sort of minerals. And the way that we analyze them in the lab is exactly the same. We're just kind of finding out different things about them.

• 3:21Chuck Nice?

  So and what so if they're all the same, then what's the point? Like, why, why, like, you know, we're in space, just like every other celestial body is in space. And it's made, we're all made of the same stuff. Why are you studying?

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, that reminds me of, it was Jon Stewart on his show back when he did The Daily Show. He says NASA has, no, was it? Yeah, I think it was Jon Stewart. He said, we we went to Mars and we just discovered water on Mars for a billion dollars. We discovered what comes out of my faucet.

• 3:58Natalie Starkey?

  No, it's true. I mean, one of the main reasons that we always argue is that we can't find out a lot about the solar system that we're within by studying our own planets. So we can study our own planet to find about how, kind of how it formed and what happened over the last few billion years, but we actually can't go back in time that well because we've got plate tectonics. So our surface is constantly changing, which means that we've sort of lost that really old history about our own planet. Whereas if we're going to

• 4:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to be clear, when you say constantly changing, you mean on a geologic time scale?

• 4:30Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no plate tectonics, there's no plate tectonics dragging cities down into volcanic magma, right? This is, you're talking about a slow process here.

• 4:41Chuck Nice?

  I mean, listen, there's always hope.

• 4:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry, I interrupted. Keep going.

• 4:47Natalie Starkey?

  Absolutely fine. No, exactly. And that should be pointed out because I often think in kind of time scales of millions, if not billions of years, and that becomes normal to geologists and people that work in space science. So, but yeah, exactly. It's a very slow process. Maybe the plates that we're sitting on move maybe one to maybe 10 centimeters per year if they're going very quickly. So it's a very small, small amount that they're moving. And it's over a very long time scale. But over that time, things change. So continents move and they get, you know, taken down into the earth and melted essentially. And then we get new volcanoes producing new land, which wouldn't have been there before. But it's a problem because it means if we want to go back four and a half billion years to when our planet first was born and became a planet, it's very hard to do that with

• 5:31Natalie Starkey?

  the rocks that we have on earth because they don't really sample all of that history. But if we go to asteroids, for example, they pretty much haven't changed since they formed. They've gone through a little bit of processing. But what we'll say is that they're essentially the same as when they formed four and a half billion years ago. So by studying them, we can understand a lot more about all the planets and including earth. And we can find out things about, you know, even how life got to earth. That's one of the ways that that we can find out those answers. So, so studying space rocks is really, really valuable and getting samples on earth is also really valuable.

• 6:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so Chuck, that was a big F you to you.

• 6:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just wanna make that clear.

• 6:11Chuck Nice?

  No, no, no, I think, I think there's gotta be.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Shove it Chuck.

• 6:13Chuck Nice?

  There's gotta be some, some reason that makes sense. Well, speaking of that though, um, when you look at this, since we are constantly having a makeover here on Earth, uh, and you're getting these snapshots from these, you know, kind of frozen in time pieces that are out there. When it comes to those pieces, this is for both of you, is most of that floating out there, asteroids, these fragments, are they kind of like space, uh, to, to use a word like Natalie, is that space rubbish? Uh, is that, is that just tritus?

• 6:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  British of you.

• 6:55Chuck Nice?

  Is that, is that, is that, is that, is that like the waste of what's leftover information? Or is that, um, the remnants of something cataclysmic?

• 7:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Natalie, he just accused you of studying rubbish. Just wanted to make that clear.

• 7:11Natalie Starkey?

  Well, yes, and, and some of it is essentially, it's, it's the leftover building blocks of the planets. Uh, many of the asteroids are the same as the planets and this, the same objects as when they formed, but the planets have then grown so large that they've undergone their own processing. So you take any of the large rocky planets, they've all, what we say differentiated into layers because they've got so big that they've melted their insides and actually the, you know, the iron minerals have sunk to the middle of them and the silicate, the licae minerals are all on the outside making a crust. So they're, they're very complicated. They've actually been processed a lot. Whereas the asteroids are much smaller, so on the whole, they didn't do that. So they're sort of the leftover building blocks.

• 7:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Natalie, we think of rocks as being heavy and you're describing them as being light floating to the top. So, please explain that.

• 8:00Natalie Starkey?

  So it's all relative. Um, yeah.

• 8:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, just for those of you listening, don't try to go floating with rocks. That's wrong.

• 8:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right, that's true.

• 8:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 8:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how to, that's how to make sure the body doesn't float back up.

• 8:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 8:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rocks to it.

• 8:16Natalie Starkey?

  But it's one of the reasons we're on the surface, in fact, because you know, you go to the centre of our planet, which you can't do physically, but we know what's down there by studying rocks from space and by using geophysics and earthquakes to figure out what's down there. We know the centre of our planet is very dense, it's made of iron and nickel, so it's very dense and heavy. And then as you move outwards, you get lighter and lighter elements as you go, and then you eventually get to an atmosphere, which is obviously made of very light elements, like oxygen and nitrogen and things like that. Now, that happens on almost every planet that you find. So there's definitely this kind of relative gradation in terms of the density of the elements that you find. But when you go to the asteroids, they tend to be, there are a few that have differentiated and made these layers, but on the whole, they're small objects that didn't do that.

• 9:01Natalie Starkey?

  So they're the same all the way throughout. So if we sample them, we can learn about, basically, what is the average composition of our planet if you were to mix it all back together again and take away those layers, which is really valuable, because otherwise we don't know what kind of our starting composition is. It's almost like taking the cake, taking the cake apart, essentially. We're making a cake, we've got all these different ingredients, we can start to see what was in the cake, and we understand kind of what we started with, what were our constituent ingredients, which is really important.

• 9:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I got a question for you. So we discovered, we, you know, the astronomical community, discovered an object named Oumuamua that apparently came from outside of our solar system and was passing through. So everything you just said would give us no insight into that object, presumably, because it's not from this solar system.

• 9:56Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, so one of the great things about space is that we think, well, basically, we have laws of physics, and we think we understand some of those pretty well. And so we expect that if we go to another star system outside of our solar system, we expect things to be pretty similar. Now, we know that stars can differ, and therefore their temperatures and their sizes differ, and the things that are around them, the planets and the objects that orbit around them could be very different to what we have here. But we expect, on the whole, things to be pretty similar wherever we go. So when we go to the very edge of our solar system, what we find there is the comets, which we haven't really spoken about yet. We've spoken about the asteroids, the rocky parts of our, kind of the leftover building blocks of the planets. But when you go to the comets, they're very light. These are usually made of very light

• 10:41Natalie Starkey?

  elements, but they do contain rock dust, but they also contain a lot of ice in them, which could be water ice, it might be carbon dioxide ice, all sorts of different types of ices.

• 10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So carbon dioxide ice, we are familiar with that as dry ice.

• 10:54Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 10:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll call it that, yeah.

• 10:55Natalie Starkey?

  All sorts of things out there. So we've got lots of cold materials because these objects are really, really far from the sun. In fact, some of them are so far from the sun, we've never seen them. They're in the supposed aort cloud, which is a hypothetical thing because we've never seen it, but we think that there must be a lot of icy objects out there, which are probably quite small. We don't think there's anything the size of a planet out there because we haven't seen it yet and we probably should have if there was something very large out there. But on the whole, these objects are quite small, quite cold, and they formed basically at the start of the solar system. They formed as soon as the sun formed, and they're basically a part of this cloud that the sun formed from, a little sample of an interstellar cloud essentially. Now, these things are

• 11:39Natalie Starkey?

  very loosely gravitationally bound to our sun because they're so far away. So what can happen with these objects is that sometimes they actually get ejected from the solar system. And this is one option for what a Muamua might be. It might be a rogue comet from another planetary exoplanetary system that's been basically knocked out of its orbit, sitting far away from its sun, and it just kind of got thrown into the hinterlands of interstellar space and lost and not bound to any star gravitationally. And so just starts, you know, travelling through interstellar space forever and ever and ever until it maybe passes through another solar system without even realising that solar system's there.

• 12:21Chuck Nice?

  Wow. So it's basically a vagabond?

• 12:25Natalie Starkey?

  Yes.

• 12:27Chuck Nice?

  That's cool.

• 12:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and so, and this is made possible because at the outer reaches of the solar system, the sun's gravitational grip is only very slight on these objects. So it wouldn't take much to dislodge one from the grip of our solar system.

• 12:42Natalie Starkey?

  Exactly, because it can be dislodged by a passing planet. So in our solar system, Uranus or Neptune can pass as they orbit around the sun, they can pass these objects and literally just push them out gravitationally. Or actually, within the galaxy, a passing star coming, passing by our solar system, can actually gravitationally pull these objects away. They're just so, so far from the sun that they really aren't held on very well. They're really loosely within our solar system at all.

• 13:07Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 13:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, we gotta take a break in a couple of minutes before we get to the cosmic queries part of this. But tell me how, how Oumuamua got named?

• 13:17Natalie Starkey?

  So it was spotted, actually, almost by chance, by a telescope in Hawaii called PanStars. It's got a really complicated acronym, and I can't remember what it stands for. I never can. It's a really complicated one.

• 13:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to, just to be clear, PanStars is the acronym, not Oumuamua?

• 13:34Natalie Starkey?

  No, exactly. No, PanStars is the telescope acronym. So because it was found by a Hawaiian telescope, they thought they would give it a Hawaiian name. And I think O is, is the first part of it, which means, loosely means scout or messenger in, in Hawaiian. And then the Muamua means kind of like a visitor from, from the distant past. So it's kind of a weird idea.

• 13:54Chuck Nice?

  Oh, so it's here doing reconnaissance? Oh, I did it?

• 14:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They named it exactly what it's supposed to be named, right?

• 14:03Chuck Nice?

  Right. This is nothing more than an alien reconnaissance mission checking us out. Okay.

• 14:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Built into the name, Oumuamua. So very cool. And, and is that, does that have to be officially, uh, accepted by the, the nomenclature committees of the world?

• 14:22Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, so that's not its official name. It's a much friendlier name. But we tend to give, um, any object in the solar system or anywhere, we tend to give it a, kind of a code name, which would tend to be used in papers, in scientific papers that are published. So- That's actually been quite an interesting story because it's had its kind of proper name changed a few times because originally it was thought to be a comet, so it had a C title, and then it became an asteroid, so it became an A title, and then the scientists decided it came from interstellar space, so it became an I title with, and then the year after it. So basically, you know when it was discovered. So it's gone through some name changes, but it's now currently got an I in its name.

• 15:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, just to be clear, it would be the first I.

• 15:05Natalie Starkey?

  It is, so it's I1, in fact. So you name all the comets C1 to C2, C3, however many have been found.

• 15:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is I1.

• 15:13Natalie Starkey?

  This is number one, but there is a number two.

• 15:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. There is a number two. We will think about that after the break. We're going to take a break from StarTalk Cosmic Queries. We've got Natalie Starkey, our solar system comet expert with us, who's answering all our questions about the solar system, its vagabonds, and especially Amuamua. We'll be right back.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  Hey, I'm Roy Hill Percival, and I support StarTalk on Patreon, bringing the universe down to earth. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 15:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Cosmic Queries, the Amuamua edition. And I've got Natalie Starkey here, a friend of StarTalk's. She actually is the author of our current space show at the Hayden Planetarium. The theater is closed, obviously during the COVID shutdown, but when we reopen, you're all invited to come check it out. And Natalie, you've also written a book, Catching Stardust, beautiful title. I love it.

• 16:27Natalie Starkey?

  Thank you.

• 16:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Came out a year and a half ago or so, two years ago.

• 16:30Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 16:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And was that, did that book sort of capture your whole sort of research life, studying the comet dust from the Stardust mission, the NASA mission?

• 16:39Natalie Starkey?

  It did, yeah. So my inspiration was the Stardust mission, because I've always been fascinated by it. And it was the first mission to collect a comet sample, comet samples in space and bring them back to earth. But then I also focused an awful lot on the Rosetta mission, which was a European mission, which didn't collect samples, but what they did instead was put a laboratory onto the side of a comet instead. So that was the kind of the next best thing. They would have liked to have brought back samples, but it's really expensive to do that and technically quite challenging. We're starting to do it now with asteroids quite a few times with Asaurus Rex and the Huyabusa missions. But, you know, this was a few years ago now. So the best we could do was literally put a little landing laboratory on the side and do some experiments on the comet, which is just fascinating to me.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're actually landing on these places?

• 17:22Chuck Nice?

  Landing.

• 17:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it reminds me, I saw this comic where there was some rover that went to Mars, and there were these aliens standing on Mars, but they kind of all looked like Native Americans, right? And they say, "There goes the neighborhood!" And the colonies come back.

• 17:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But anyhow, and Natalie, you have a title. Let me get this correct. The Officer for Outreach and Public Engagement at the Open University in the UK.

• 17:50Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 17:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that means anytime we call you, you have to show up.

• 17:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's in your title.

• 18:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Outreach, Public Engagement. So I'm just going to hold you to that.

• 18:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's kind of, that's, I would get them to change that because that means that it's almost like being, like, "My name is Chuck Nice," and so, like, it's very difficult to be, like, you know, an ass. Because the moment, because the moment I have a bad day, people are like, "I knew he wasn't nice. I knew, I knew it."

• 18:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 18:25Chuck Nice?

  You know, so now, like, you have to engage people. You have to.

• 18:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you have to. You have to.

• 18:30Natalie Starkey?

  And I love doing it as well. And so that's why, a few years ago, I did give up full-time science research because I found that, actually, I just love, it's talking to people about this stuff. And it's always fascinated me. And I've written now my second book on space science. And it's just what I love doing. And I hope.

• 18:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Has that book come out yet?

• 18:49Natalie Starkey?

  No, it'll be out in September 2021.

• 18:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so we'll get you back on, we'll talk about it.

• 18:53Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, that would be great. It's about space volcanoes. So, um, yeah.

• 18:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I love that. And there's no book on that. Oh, my gosh.

• 18:59Natalie Starkey?

  There are at the moment. No, there's, um, so, yeah.

• 19:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you have ice volcanoes in there as well?

• 19:04Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, so it's Fire and Ice, it's called. So I've looked on all the hot volcanoes and then all the cold volcanoes as well.

• 19:10Chuck Nice?

  So now the volcano is actually on a planet. It's just not a volcano floating through.

• 19:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Vagabond volcanoes.

• 19:19Chuck Nice?

  Cause you know, I thought it might have been like a Muamua, just, you know, just, just floating through the cosmos, spewing out stuff.

• 19:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be so weird. That would be a science fiction stories, um, embarrassing fact because they think volcanoes just, they're not actually connected to anything below. This would be a profound ignorance of geophysics if there's just a volcano spewing.

• 19:43Chuck Nice?

  Volcano, just, right, like, like a loc- like a cosmic locomotive.

• 19:48Chuck Nice?

  Spewing out stuff from, from its opening.

• 19:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, we, we solicited questions about Oumuamua. So what, uh, from our fan base, are these all Patreons? If not, definitely start with them.

• 19:58Chuck Nice?

  Yes, we will always start with Patreon and I think most of these questions are from our Patreon patrons. And so let's get right into it. And, uh, let's see here. This is Curtis Lee Zattlehack.

• 20:12Chuck Nice?

  And he says, maybe that's his name. Uh, he says, he says, given the extreme rarity of objects zipping through our solar system, even when those objects are homegrown asteroids or comets, what is the likelihood of another object like a Muamua passing through in the lifetime of anyone old enough to remember this recent event? So, um, what kind of frequency would we see? Could, could we see?

• 20:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And is anybody looking for them so that one, if they, uh, yeah, do we, what guarantee do we have that we would spot everyone that comes through as an interloper?

• 20:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we, maybe we've already missed like 10 of them.

• 20:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 20:53Natalie Starkey?

  I mean, for sure, we've missed probably quite a few. It's it's very unlikely that this is the first object to have gone through our solar system from another star. And so we don't know for sure, because obviously, we haven't been looking for that long. So the Pan Stars Telescope that spotted this one, as I said in the last segment, it wasn't actually looking for it. It's looking for near earth asteroids. So it's part of our our kind of defence system of looking about what's out there around our planet. And and one of the objects that are close to us in terms of asteroids and comets that might pose a risk to us in the future. Now, it doesn't look at all of the sky all the time. It can't do that. It's not designed to do that. So it looks at portions of the sky at different times.

• 21:35Natalie Starkey?

  So there's a really high chance that it could just miss one of these objects completely. But over the course of time, the objects that were in our solar system, it should spot all of them, because it kind of goes around and goes around again and looks at different portions of sky. But obviously, something just flying through randomly that we're not expecting and isn't on an orbit around our sun is much easier to miss.

• 21:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, Natalie, plus, most of these objects you're describing are in the plane of the solar system. So if you're going to design a search to get the most of them, you're going to stick to the plane. So if some coming from above or below, you don't have as good a sky coverage there, do you?

• 22:11Natalie Starkey?

  That's very true. And actually, we do, some of the comets within our own solar system don't come along that what we call the ecliptic plane of the solar system, the one that basically all the planets are on. And so all the asteroids should do, but some of the, well, many of the comets, what we call the long period comets, which are these ones in the Oort Cloud, which sit in basically a cloud around the solar system. So you have the plane of the planets, and then you've got this kind of shell of comets, icy objects, which are comets, basically. And when those come into the inner solar system and go via the sun, they can come in from all very different random angles and then can be going quite fast. And so we do spot those as well. And but the objects that are coming from interstellar space can come from literally anywhere, and they're travelling very, very quickly in relation to the objects that are

• 22:56Natalie Starkey?

  within our solar system. So that's kind of the first. Thing, the first piece of evidence that we go, oh, hold on a minute. We don't think this is from our solar system. It's going far too quickly. It can't have been sped up by interacting with a large planet like Jupiter. It's just going far too quickly for that. In fact, Amumu was going so quickly that it didn't even, it didn't even care our sun was there. Our sun is massive, it has a huge amount of gravity. But Amumu just passed straight by it and it didn't even get kind of pulled in towards it. And so, you know, it didn't care. It was going so quickly and it was just chance that we spotted it.

• 23:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it did bend a little bit, just not so much at all, right? It was like, it took a look and then kept going.

• 23:38Natalie Starkey?

  So it was on basically a hyperbolic orbit. So it's, and it had excess hyperbolic velocity. So it wasn't going to get captured by our sun, as you know, our comets and asteroids are. And but spotting other ones, we just don't know. Because the problem is, we don't understand how many objects are lost from a solar system like ours or from other star systems outside in the galaxy. We don't know how much material is thrown out into interstellar space. And we've started to make models that kind of guess at these numbers or the volume of material, the size of material. For example, you might get comets pulled off and sent out into interstellar space. You might get a planet being disrupted and broken apart by interaction with another planet or something. And they can get thrown out, but we just don't know how much is out there.

• 24:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how many, how many I objects do we know?

• 24:25Natalie Starkey?

  We've had two. So we've got Amumu, which is number one. And then there was one called 2I Borisov, which was spotted, I think, in 2019 or 2018. And that's the second one. So that is thought to be a comet. But again, it's an interstellar object. So we've got two now that I know of.

• 24:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two in a couple of years, two in a couple of years.

• 24:46Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow, we are, we are on a roll.

• 24:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're coming on a roll.

• 24:50Chuck Nice?

  So Lev, you said the second one was a comet. Now, how do you differentiate between a comet from our, or cloud or just, you know, out there past, you know, hanging around our solar system? And an interstellar? Is it from the way it comes in? Or what are the determining, determining characteristics?

• 25:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, she just spent 10 minutes explaining that. It's on a hyperbolic orbit.

• 25:13Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay, yeah, well, I wasn't.

• 25:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It has a speed that is unlike anything that an orbit around the sun would give you.

• 25:20Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 25:20Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha, so that's it. And, and, and.

• 25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now here's a question. Let me, let me help you out. Chuck, I'll help you out on this, okay? Pretend Chuck asked this question, right? If the object is at such distance from us, how do you know whether it's a comet or an asteroid?

• 25:34Natalie Starkey?

  Okay, so one of the ways, so one of the things the scientists look for when they first spotted this object was they got, as soon as they found out they'd seen it on Panestars, they were like, we need to get some other telescopes looking at it to try and just find out a little bit more about it. It was already at this point moving away from the sun, so it was getting further and further away from us. So we had to do, be really quick. So over a period of a few weeks-

• 25:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's getting dimmer faster, very quickly.

• 25:56Natalie Starkey?

  Exactly, and it's already quite a small object. We think it's a maximum of maybe a thousand metres long and maybe a hundred or so metres wide. So first of all, it's quite a weird shape, but we can come back to that. But it is quite small, so trying to see these things is tricky, and it's not very bright. So trying to see anything dark in space is always tricky. It needs to reflect the sun or produce its own light for us to see it. Now, the way it can become brighter is if it starts to produce activity off its surface. Now, we would expect that from a comet, because I explained earlier that we have the comets in the outer solar system, they're very icy, they're made up of lots of different types of ice. Now, when you bring ice close to something hot, it's either going to melt, or if you bring it something really, really hot, it's going to sublimate, so it's going to turn straight

• 26:39Natalie Starkey?

  to gas. So the ice in a comet, when it gets close to the sun, starts to stream off the surface, producing a geishous kind of envelope around the nucleus, the rocky part of the comet, and also brings off dust particles with it. So you can see this stuff really quite easily with telescopes. Now, when they looked at-

• 26:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the object basically gets bigger. It's, its ability to reflect light improves-

• 27:02Natalie Starkey?

  Yes.

• 27:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As all this, as this cloud around it grows, okay.

• 27:07Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, so it appears larger and we see it because it's kind of glowing for us, so we'll see that activity. Now, Amurumua didn't produce any cometary-style activity that we could see, anyway. Now, it's, the problem is that we wouldn't necessarily see it because it was getting very far away. I think Borisov, the other one, did produce cometary activity when it went close to the sun, so we could then tell that it was, probably had some ices somewhere within its structure, and therefore it was probably a rogue comet from another star system. But yeah, for Amurumua, we didn't see that activity, which doesn't mean it isn't there, it just means we couldn't see it.

• 27:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Below the detection limits, as is typically reported in a scientific paper. Yeah, it's number, this isn't or this is, it's the evidence supports that it isn't, or the evidence supports that it is.

• 27:55Natalie Starkey?

  Exactly.

• 27:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, give me another question.

• 27:56Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. This is Philip DeWint. Is there any?

• 28:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Philip who?

• 28:01Chuck Nice?

  Philip DeWint.

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  DeWint, okay.

• 28:05Chuck Nice?

  He says, or Dewint, one or the other. He says, is there any evidence that there's more objects coming our way? Or, I mean, you kind of just said that, you know, that, you know, we really don't know, but is there any evidence right now?

• 28:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, well, let's ask it another way. Did both of these come from the same direction?

• 28:26Chuck Nice?

  Same place, yeah.

• 28:27Natalie Starkey?

  Oh, that's a good question, because I don't actually know the answer to that one. I don't know where the second one actually came from. I know a little more about Amu Amu. Now, we only know that it came from a certain region of the galaxy, but it's hard to, we don't know exactly where it came from, because when we try and backtrack that in time, we don't know how long it's been traveling, and the galaxy moves during that time. It could have been up there for fifty million years, traveling through space, or even longer. So we don't know exactly where it's come from. We can't pinpoint it to a particular star,

• 28:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, what you're saying, because the galaxy rotates, the farther back in time you want to trace it, the more, you have to sort of unscramble what the galaxy had been doing to have any sense of where it was fifty million years ago, or a hundred million years ago.

• 29:10Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, and then we don't know when it was ejected. If it came from another star system, we don't know when it was ejected. So trying to work back where it came from is, you know, almost impossible.

• 29:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it takes about two hundred million years for the galaxy to make one full rotation.

• 29:22Natalie Starkey?

  Okay.

• 29:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, anything that is, you think has been in space that long, then it could not have possibly come from where you think it did, because the whole galaxy did a whole rotation on that.

• 29:35Natalie Starkey?

  So, yeah, it's very likely that more of these style of objects are gonna pass through our solar system. They probably have been for eons, ever since, you know, the solar system formed. Equally, some of the objects from our solar system will be out there doing the same thing. When you think even about just the Voyager spacecraft now, they're just gonna go out into space now and continue on. And if there's any aliens out there on other planets and other star systems in the future, they may then see those spacecraft and go, oh, what is it? Is it a kite or an asteroid? Or, oh, it's an alien spacecraft.

• 30:01Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, so Chuck, here's the good story that we're missing here, is maybe there was a destroyed solar system, and all their debris came towards us.

• 30:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we can just get the pieces and reassemble their monuments and temples.

• 30:15Chuck Nice?

  Oh, look at that, Cosmic Lego. Lego set.

• 30:18Natalie Starkey?

  So cool.

• 30:19Chuck Nice?

  That's a cosmic Lego set.

• 30:21Natalie Starkey?

  That would be great. Yeah, with homeschooling. I'm mostly just doing exercise and Lego, so this is great.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, one more question before we take the next break.

• 30:31Chuck Nice?

  All right, here it is. Cameron Bishop says, I was wondering, could objects like a Muamua be great opportunities to study the idea of panspermia?

• 30:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mmm, good one.

• 30:41Chuck Nice?

  How would panspermia unfold without destroying the genetic material on impact? Not of a Muamua, because that's not going to impact. But if we were to have an object that would impact us, how would we be able to study it like that?

• 30:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to put this in context, there are two levels of panspermia you can imagine. One of them is life moving from planet to planet within a solar system, and then asking whether there's enough sort of forces operating to get life from one star system to another in the galaxy. So I think this question is going to the sort of the limiting case on that. So Natalie, what do you have to say about that?

• 31:21Natalie Starkey?

  So it's going to be tricky. First of all, we didn't get to study this particular object enough for long enough to even have any idea what it's made of. We really don't know if it's metal or rock or really what it's made of. So in terms of seeing whether it contains carbon or any other kind of organic molecules on there, we have no idea. In the future, if we had enough notice that one was coming and we could study it in more detail, we would definitely need to put a mission up there to sample some of it, because we're not going to get the answer just by looking at it with telescopes. So it's pie in the sky, really. It's not a question we're going to be answering anytime soon. We're trying to do that kind of science with asteroids and comets within our own solar system, and that's kind of the level that we're at. We're trying to get up there and see what they contain. Do they contain the building blocks for life, et cetera, et cetera?

• 32:05Natalie Starkey?

  So it's a long way off, but it is a good question, because we have no idea. Obviously, we have no idea if we're alone in the solar system or in the galaxy or the universe. So yeah, it's one way that we could start to think about that in the future.

• 32:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, but there's another half of that question, which is, and I'll juice up the question just to get your answer. If, in fact, we do learn that one of these objects has not only organic molecules, but like the building blocks, you know, amino acids and maybe even some life form on it. Panstpermia requires that that has an encounter with a planet and then that planet gets seeded. Will any of those molecules and early life forms possibly survive such an impact?

• 32:51Natalie Starkey?

  I mean, it's unlikely, particularly for an object going through interstellar space. First of all, it's going to be subject to really high levels of radiation and the temperatures are just crazy. But, okay, so if something could survive for that long on a small object, which I think is very unlikely, then if it was collide with another object, that would probably be quite a devastating collision for both parties involved. So I think it's unlikely.

• 33:17Chuck Nice?

  After billions of miles in interstellar space at absolute zero close to it, and then all the radiation you're talking about, let me tell you something, I'm not giving up from no fender bender. When I crash into a planet, my response is, that's all you got? This is home. I'm home.

• 33:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so, so, clearly, the atoms survive the collision. So if there were organic molecules, that carbon and nitrogen and silicon and all the rest of whatever we need, then those molecules could be broken apart. But nonetheless, you can still think of these objects as feeding the chemical elements necessary for life.

• 34:06Chuck Nice?

  Prometheus.

• 34:07Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 34:08Chuck Nice?

  That's the movie.

• 34:11Natalie Starkey?

  I mean, we need, we need all those basic elements to make the building blocks for carbon molecules and organic matter, but it's a big step. And we, you know, we have a lot of that matter everywhere, but we, it's making that step.

• 34:24Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my God. Now I want to ask, now I got to ask, but I know we got to end, so I'll wait.

• 34:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got to take a quick break. All right, put it on the table.

• 34:31Chuck Nice?

  All right, here it is. So based on what you just said, and you talk about comets, is there a way like a comet could come in and just as it, instead of burning up in the atmosphere, it just deposits what it is across like, you know, our atmosphere, almost like, you know, seeding, but not necessarily so?

• 34:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back from our commercial, we will find out.

• 34:57Chuck Nice?

  You got me.

• 34:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Take a quick break. StarTalk Cosmic Queries with Natalie Star.

• 35:08Chuck Nice?

  It's time to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons. Christopher Sukanenya, Dmitri Pukachevich, and Ingenio Barrera. Thank you so much, guys, for your support. Without you, you know, we couldn't do this show. And for those of you listening who would like your very own Patreon shout out, please go to patreon.com/stargtorkradio and support us.

• 35:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk Cosmic Queries, a Muamua edition. The Interloper from Outer Space, Interstellar Space. I got Cosmochemist Natalie Starkey. Always good to have you, Natalie. And Natalie, do you, um, do you have a Twitter handle you can share with people?

• 35:54Natalie Starkey?

  I do, it's at Starkey Stardust.

• 35:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Starkey Stardust, oh, man, you get all the good, oh, man. Okay.

• 36:01Chuck Nice?

  Wow, not only are you a cosmochemist, which sounds like the space version of Breaking Bad, but then, but then you get Starkey Stardust on top of that.

• 36:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, man.

• 36:13Chuck Nice?

  That's good stuff, good stuff.

• 36:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And Chuck's handle is Chuck Nice Comic.

• 36:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. So inventive.

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we left off, we last left off, uh, wondering, you, you asked the question, Chuck.

• 36:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 36:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That if a comet can come in and it has the ingredients for life.

• 36:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Instead of colliding with Earth and burning up, can it just sort of break up in the atmosphere? And then sprinkle down gently? And the problem here, Chuck, is the matter of the kinetic energy it has. That energy has to go somewhere. Somebody's gotta eat that kinetic energy. And if it hits the atmosphere or the ground, all that kinetic energy goes back into the object and it destroys every fricking molecule. However...

• 37:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Natalie's Stardust mission managed to collect comet particles with a fast-moving object. So Natalie, what magic did you guys perform on this mission so that you didn't destroy the very thing you tried to collect?

• 37:18Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, I mean, I can't take any credit for it. I just got to analyze some of the particles that we collected. But Natalie did an amazing amount of work and her scientists worked on some material called aerogel, which is basically a very light, not very dense material, which is mostly made of silica. It's all made of silica. And it slows down the particles as they're captured. So it was made into like blocks on this kind of tennis racket-style collector. So it literally flew through the tail of the comet, particles from the comet hit this collector, and they were rapidly decelerated. But the important part when you do that is not to let the particles heat up. So this material actually took the heat away from those particles as they impacted and preserved them really, really beautifully.

• 38:01Natalie Starkey?

  In fact, even the really kind of volatile stuff, like the organic matter, which should have kind of gone evaporated away essentially.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Natalie, what you're suggesting is if we replace Earth's atmosphere with aerogel, then we'd be able to collect anything that fell in?

• 38:18Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 38:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, just checking on that. Chuck, let's see if we can do a lightning round. See how many of these questions we can get in.

• 38:26Chuck Nice?

  All right, okay. This is Tony Hamm, who says, "Could have gotten the shape due to the possible gravitational pull of planets and stars." So, you know, we didn't talk about the shape, but it's...

• 38:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, she gave the dimensions. It's very, it's like cigar-shaped, right?

• 38:42Chuck Nice?

  Cigar, yeah.

• 38:44Natalie Starkey?

  We're not exactly sure. It's hard to know the shape because we can't see it directly. So one of the, we think it's probably quite long. It's possibly five to 10 times longer than it is wide, which is a really unusual shape. We've seen nothing like that in our solar system. And if it was over five times longer than its width, then it's a really weird shape. So it's really hard to describe how that would have come from a comet or an asteroid or another planet. It is extremely strange. It might not be cigar-shaped. Some people think it might be kind of flat, almost like a disc shape. So it's basically quite long in relation to how wide it is.

• 39:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But why can't it, like, tidal forces have stretched it out? Like, for example, in Comet Shoemaker-Levy back 25 years ago, that was one comet broken into many pieces. If you couldn't resolve the different pieces, and you step back, you might think it's just one long elongated comet, wouldn't you?

• 39:36Natalie Starkey?

  Potentially, but they're all basically rotating at the same time, so that they would be bound in some way. Because we use light curve data, which is used in astronomy all the time to look at objects outside of our Earth, and, you know, stars and planets and things. And the way we do this is we look at how it reflects the light, how an object reflects the sunlight, or whatever it might be, the star near it. And what, it's got a very odd light curve shape. And so basically, it looks like this object is essentially tumbling through space. Normally, an asteroid or comet would just rotate very, almost very neatly and very predictably. And but this is basically tumbling. It's really, really odd. So I think it's got to be one object, because if it was a lot of objects, you probably wouldn't expect to see that, that pattern in the light curve data.

• 40:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All happening coherently?

• 40:21Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah.

• 40:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Give me another.

• 40:23Chuck Nice?

  So there are a lot of people who think that this might be some type of alien technology, or some kind of masked alien craft. Philip N. I. says, "Is this from another civilization?"

• 40:42Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, no, it's really exciting that, when this was suggested, it is a really exciting prospect. But we've got to remember, I love the old Carl Sagan saying, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." And we don't have the evidence to really strongly support the idea that this is an alien spaceship, or some alien spaceship junk, or something like that. What we have to do first is rule out all the more natural observations that we've made, all the more actual ideas about what this thing could be.

• 41:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But wait, just to be clear, your statement, "We have to rule them out", is a, in a way, a scientific bias against it being aliens. Right?

• 41:19Natalie Starkey?

  Yes.

• 41:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To say we have to rule out these other explanations before we accept the aliens, that's, uh, let me not call it a bias. It's the history of this exercise shows that that's the right thing to do. Is that a fair way to say it?

• 41:30Natalie Starkey?

  It is. And we have to apply Occam's razor. We have to go with the simplest explanation first because it's usually the correct one. But once we've ruled out the more simple explanations, that it's a comet or an asteroid or a piece of a broken piece of a planet from another exoplanet, then we can start to look at the more obscure things like, is it a piece of an alien spaceship or something?

• 41:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what was the most compelling evidence to even think this at all?

• 41:52Natalie Starkey?

  Um, I think the fact, its shape is probably one of the hardest things to describe. Um, but having said that, we don't really understand its shape very well. As I said, we, we don't know its exact dimensions and, and we don't know what it's made from.

• 42:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember reading that its, its trajectory through the solar system was behaving in ways that sort of Newton's law of gravity would not have predicted. Is that still holding up, that, those observations?

• 42:17Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah. So, um, so yeah, it, it basically was speeding up, um, as it went by the sun, but it was not because of gravity from the sun. Objects normally speed up as they go towards the sun, um, because of its gravity. But this, it wasn't happening because of gravity. So we have to explain why it was speeding up, um, how it got this kind of more, basically more velocities that went by the sun that wasn't due to gravity.

• 42:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Duh, it's aliens.

• 42:42Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 42:44Natalie Starkey?

  So that is a hard one to explain. Scientists are looking at that.

• 42:47Chuck Nice?

  They turned on the impulse engine.

• 42:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's exactly right.

• 42:51Natalie Starkey?

  That might be comets. So this, this little engine, it could have inside, it could be jets, uh, basically of comet, comet jets coming off it.

• 42:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just said it's not a comet.

• 42:59Natalie Starkey?

  We don't know for sure.

• 43:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It doesn't have comet fuzz.

• 43:01Natalie Starkey?

  So that's the problem. We don't, we can't rule it out. So I think that's what we've got to stick with, simple explanations first, and we've got a lot more work to do. We're not going to do it on this comet or this object, sorry, um, because it's gone now and we're never going to see it again.

• 43:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Okay, so if I could recap what you just said, it's you want to rule out every possible natural explanation, and even when you've ruled them all out, are you compelled to say that it's alien, or might you say, I'm not clever enough to figure out what missing natural explanation I've yet to?

• 43:34Natalie Starkey?

  Yeah, I think that, I think the latter, because it's even like, you know, when we found, we thought we found life in the atmosphere of Venus, like, the scientists had to work so hard to rule out all the natural things that could have been, and all the natural, other than the other, other natural things, and then they said it could be life, but they still weren't sure, and so they put that out there and said it could be, but I think we can never say for sure.

• 43:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, the press eats it up.

• 43:56Natalie Starkey?

  And that's always the problem with making these claims, that you've got to be really careful, because then they're misconstrued by, by the media craft.

• 44:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 44:04Chuck Nice?

  Listen, Natalie, just need you to rule out eleven thousand, seven hundred, ninety-nine reasons, so that we can get to alien. That's all I need. I'm just saying, we're all scientists here, how do we get to alien?

• 44:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rule, that's a famous number now, right? Eleven thousand, seven hundred, ninety-nine, whatever.

• 44:26Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 44:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Another question.

• 44:30Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go.

• 44:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, by the way, to future people twenty years from now who are listening to this podcast, just go back and read the news from January to twenty twenty-one.

• 44:39Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 44:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And who Chuck Nice was imitating. This is to future people.

• 44:43Chuck Nice?

  You won't know from the imitation.

• 44:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who opened the time capsule.

• 44:48Chuck Nice?

  The imitation's so bad, you won't know, but if you, if you look up the, you'll get it. Anyway, um, E. Capon, uh, wait, wait, Capyanas, Cap, Capyanas, that's it, all right.

• 45:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sure that's it, Chuck, I'm sure.

• 45:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, whatever, I'm making it, it is now, damn it.

• 45:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is now.

• 45:07Chuck Nice?

  That's your name now, E. Capyanas, um.

• 45:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, and this has got to be the last question because we've been too luxurious here.

• 45:14Chuck Nice?

  I know we have. All right, so here's the deal, and I like this. What is the shape of an asteroid? Because we're talking about it's you talk about its unusual shape, he says, or she says, what is it usual for an asteroid to have a cylindrical shape? What is the shape of an asteroid?

• 45:29Natalie Starkey?

  Great question. Basically, it depends on size. And now we've gone out to the solar system and started looking at more of these objects. We found they can be loads of different shapes and sizes. And so they tend to be sort of round. They tend to approximate a round shape, but they're not always. The smaller ones can definitely be sort of any shape you like, but they're gonna they're not. We've not seen anything like this before. So it is really, really unusual, and it is hard to explain with natural processes. But we need to figure out some more stuff. So, yeah.

• 46:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is asteroids have the greatest sort of variation in shape. And among the high variations in shapes that you have seen and measured, this falls outside of that high variation.

• 46:11Natalie Starkey?

  It's definitely at the the upper end.

• 46:13Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 46:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I know what it is. It was it was a vertical plug in the throat of a volcano, and it shot out. Okay, and it was actually a weapon coming through space. And so the volcanoes in space movie will now has a new way it can have attack ships.

• 46:31Natalie Starkey?

  Okay, I like that one.

• 46:33Chuck Nice?

  I like that one.

• 46:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Natalie, we'll look forward to your next book coming out in the fall of 2021. And A Catching Stardust, it's a it's a it's quite the story that I think everyone should know about. And who publishes that?

• 46:51Natalie Starkey?

  It's by Bloomsbury.

• 46:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bloomsbury, I remember that. That's right. I remember that correctly. Okay. Excellent. Natalie, always good to have you. Thanks for dialing in from the UK.

• 46:59Natalie Starkey?

  Thank you. No, thanks for having me.

• 47:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And homeschooling your four year old. So keep that going.

• 47:05Natalie Starkey?

  I'll continue. I'll do my best. Another three months to go.

• 47:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Excellent. All right, guys. Thank you again, Natalie and Chuck. This has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, bidding you to keep looking up.