Things You Thought You Knew – Bada Bing!

The sun, moon, and SPACETIME CONTINUUM? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice break down space and time and other cosmic things you thought you knew.

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 in a things you thought you knew edition. And I can't do that without Chuck Nice. Chuck.

• 0:22Chuck Nice?

  Hey Neil.

• 0:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With me on this. Yeah, yeah.

• 0:26Chuck Nice?

  So much fun, these are. So much fun.

• 0:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I want to talk about the space-time continuum.

• 0:32Chuck Nice?

  All right. That's, I'm cool with that.

• 0:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've heard that.

• 0:35Chuck Nice?

  Are you kidding me? It is only the premise of every frickin' sci-fi thing ever.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes. I just want to ground it. I just want to ground it in a few ways that I don't think people spend time doing. So, let's think this.

• 0:50Chuck Nice?

  Are you gonna ruin space-time the way you did Pluto? Is that what's gonna happen right now?

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nothing I can do can help Pluto, just so you know. It's out of my hands. So, I've washed my hands of its demolition.

• 1:04Chuck Nice?

  You are the Pontius Pilate.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pontius Pilate. Yeah, that's a line right out of one of those accounts of the Trial of Jesus.

• 1:18Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, here we go. 1905.

• 1:23Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  1905. You should know immediately, one thing should know in your head, 1905. Einstein comes out with this special theory of relativity.

• 1:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:34Chuck Nice?

  Sets the world on fire.

• 1:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not what he called it. It was, the paper that delivered it to us is called "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", and no one wanted to recite that, so it was just called "Special Relativity", but that's what it is. Because it's all about the relativity of motion and time.

• 1:51Chuck Nice?

  Okay?

• 1:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what it did was codify the fact that...

• 1:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That spatial dimensions need a four, the three spatial dimensions, you know, height, width, and depth, need a fourth dimension to localize it in any spatial system you're talking about. And since you needed time, then it's a spacetime system. So, so it sounds like it's weird, like, what are you doing Einstein? You know, leave me alone with my height, width, and depth. But it turns out, we have always thought about life in four dimensions. Always. And here's an example of why. If I say to you, Chuck, I'll meet you tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock.

• 2:41Chuck Nice?

  I'll say, great, what are we doing? I'm so excited to find out. Okay, I love when you surprise me like this.

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, okay, okay, I can do that, but I'll say, all right, that's fine. I'll meet you at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street.

• 2:55Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 2:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's your next question to me?

• 2:57Chuck Nice?

  When? Because I don't want to stay there all day waiting for you.

• 3:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you knew that giving you those coordinates, right, Earth's surface, 33rd Street, Fifth Avenue, 34th Street, you knew that's insufficient for us to actually meet?

• 3:12Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're gonna say, when? Bada bing! The time coordinate just got slapped on there.

• 3:17Chuck Nice?

  Did you just bada bing spacetime?

• 3:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did. I did bada bing spacetime. All right. You know, is that, is that forgivable to you? Yeah. All right. So, and you can reverse that, right? I can say, Chuck, I'll meet you at 12 noon tomorrow.

• 3:40Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your next question to me is?

• 3:43Chuck Nice?

  When or where? Where?

• 3:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just said when.

• 3:46Chuck Nice?

  Okay, where?

• 3:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where, exactly. So we cannot meet.

• 3:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unless the spatial coordinate is specified and the temporal coordinate is specified. Oh, and by the way, because we're all kind of stuck on Earth's surface, if you want to do the full-up three-dimensional meet in space, I would say I'll meet you at Fifth Avenue, 34th Street, 107 floors up. Right. Okay? Or 86 floors up. That would be the Empire State Building, because that's the coordinate of the Empire State Building. So I'd give one dimension, the other dimension, and then a height dimension. Those are all three dimensions. Often, you don't give the height dimension because you're just meeting on the street. Right. It's just implicit, yes, we're going to meet on Earth's surface this time. Right, right. That one is an easy one to just accept as a given.

• 4:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But technically, if you wanted all three, if you wanted to do it full-up, you'd give three dimensions: Earth's surface, 34th Street, Fifth Avenue, and at a time. So we already knew this, but no one thought about it that way. Now, here are the consequences of that. If you're crossing the street, and then a minute later, a truck drives down the street, you are in the same place as that truck.

• 5:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. When you're in the middle of the street. At the right time, though, I was in that same place.

• 5:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, the right time meaning that's not where the truck is at that time. Exactly. Yes, so I don't want to say you were in the same place at the wrong time, you were in the same place at the right time. At the right time. So we are always in the same place as each other, but it doesn't mean anything until you're there at the same time. So I just want to drive home that concept. So now, let's go to sci-fi movies. Right. How about Back to the Future, one of the greatest sort of thought-through time-travel stories there are, including The Terminator, I think, thought-through time-travel very hard. Pretty well, yeah. Yeah, they did all right. I have an issue, wait, I have an issue with Arnold. What issue? Tell me, tell me now.

• 5:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why do you have a problem? So, the first...

• 6:05Chuck Nice?

  Alright, so anyway, you had a problem with, one problem with, um, uh, the Terminator.

• 6:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 6:11Chuck Nice?

  Even though it's a very well thought through.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a well thought through, so he goes back in time to kill, uh, the, the possible parents of, of, uh...

• 6:21Chuck Nice?

  Of John Connor.

• 6:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, the leader of the, of the new...

• 6:23Chuck Nice?

  Of the resistance.

• 6:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Movement, of the resistance. But all he had to do is prevent his, the parents from meeting each other. I mean, you, you can go back four generations earlier and just put two people on a different train, so they never meet, and that entire genetic lineage never exists.

• 6:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? So this idea that he's gotta kill them and it's gonna be all bloody, that made it like a violent movie, but it could have been done a little more, uh, with, with less blood and gore. But also, just the fact that when he comes through, he comes out butt naked, remember that?

• 6:55Chuck Nice?

  I do remember that.

• 6:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In, in this bubble, and you remember why he had to come through butt naked?

• 6:58Chuck Nice?

  Uh, because I am flesh over endoskeleton, and, uh...

• 7:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, because nothing, no living tissue, no, no dead tissue made it through the...

• 7:07Chuck Nice?

  Right, could go through, right.

• 7:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could go through the time machine. Except, of course, hair is dead.

• 7:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he would have been just totally bald, coming through, and no eyebrows, no, nothing, okay? I just thought I'd say that, that there was an inconsistency within it.

• 7:21Chuck Nice?

  Time travel is giving me alopecia.

• 7:26Chuck Nice?

  What happened?

• 7:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alopecia? I mean, how do you even know that that exists? Alopecia is where you, you don't, you lose all your hair, you don't grow your hair, at any age, it can happen, right?

• 7:35Chuck Nice?

  At any age, no matter what.

• 7:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alopecia. Alright, so, um, where was I? Oh, so here's what you have to be concerned about. Let's go to Back to the Future. When, uh, Mar- Marty, yeah, give, give me some Doc Brown here.

• 7:47Chuck Nice?

  Marty, it's the case of time!

• 7:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, now I'm in the mood, thank you.

• 7:52Chuck Nice?

  Get in the car, Marty!

• 7:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so there's Marty and he's being chased by the Libyan terrorists, okay?

• 8:01Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 8:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in the parking lot, in the Twin Pines parking lot, alright. And then he, he, he, there's a date in there from 1955. And he goes back in time to 1955, okay? And he lands in the Twin Pines Ranch. Cause as we know, all good farmland becomes strip malls, right? In modern times.

• 8:25Chuck Nice?

  Makes sense.

• 8:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. What they didn't address is the fact that he would only land in that ranch if he goes back to when Earth was in the same place in its orbit.

• 8:42Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 8:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He would have to be traveling on the anniversary of the date that he was, that, of when he left.

• 8:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that Earth is back where it is, so that when he goes back in time, he doesn't end up suffocating in the vacuum of space.

• 8:55Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man. That, first of all, would be the best time travel short film ever.

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Marty, I discovered the secrets of time travel, Marty.

• 9:09Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get in the car.

• 9:11Chuck Nice?

  And then the two of them are just floating in space.

• 9:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The end.

• 9:15Chuck Nice?

  The end.

• 9:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't think this through, Marty.

• 9:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you need, so, so I'm just saying, it's not good enough just to travel back in time. You need something to propel you in space as well. So it's a space-time, a space-time machine, not just a time machine. Because Earth is a moving target.

• 9:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just want to make that clear.

• 9:39Chuck Nice?

  That's really cool, actually.

• 9:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, just to go back in time, you could still land on Earth, but how was Earth rotated?

• 9:45Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 9:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could end up in Siberia, in the middle of the ocean, probably. Cause most of Earth's longitude is spanned by ocean. So, so I just wanted to sort of, is truth in time travel with regard to these space-time coordinates? Now, we call these, your coordinate in space and your coordinate in time, we call that your world line.

• 10:06Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 10:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  World line. So your world line is where and when you are.

• 10:12Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 10:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you can step back and look at everyone's worldlines. And the worldlines are sort of, it's, think of it as sort of some kind of shadow moving through this hyper coordinate system. And so that way, if I have to go to even a higher dimension, so I can see your entire worldline. If I see your entire worldline, you are always being born, you're always living out your life, and you're always dying.

• 10:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I can see the time coordinate.

• 10:36Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, the, the whole timeline is there in front of me.

• 10:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I can see other people's worldlines intersect your worldline. Oh, that's when you met your wife. Okay? That's when you were in my office and we recorded that episode.

• 10:48Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 10:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so imagine this spaghetti picture of all these worldlines of human beings interacting.

• 10:56Chuck Nice?

  This is cool.

• 10:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that, I don't think, I'm, I don't know that anyone has actually thought to portray that.

• 11:02Chuck Nice?

  No, they have not. That's why I said this is so cool. Because first of all, first I've ever heard of it. But secondly, that is something that nobody's put in sci-fi in terms of. Actually, I take it back. There, there's a couple Star Trek episodes where they play with that, but they don't present it that way. They still present the linear as portrayed in different positions.

• 11:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 11:30Chuck Nice?

  It's still the linear and different, but what you're talking about is so much cooler. Actually, what you're talking about is, um, on a religious, from a religious standpoint, what people believe to be God's way of seeing time and space, which makes everything predetermined, yet still gives us responsibility for our actions. That, right, it's, it's how that all plays out.

• 11:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you Reverend Chuck.

• 12:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a new, the church, the new church of worldlines.

• 12:03Chuck Nice?

  The new church of worldlines.

• 12:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The space-time continuum. All right. So anyhow, so that's, that's how that works. And one last point in Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse Five.

• 12:14Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 12:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which ostensibly takes place in, at the end of the Second World War. Um, and there's the other sort of historical details I won't get into. What I was most intrigued by is the time travel that goes on in that. And he actually captures that accurately. So what happens is the lead protagonist gets abducted by aliens, gets put in a cage. And that sounds bad, but they said, no, you're still there. You're still being born. You're still dying. And they went outside of his timeline.

• 12:39Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so he would sit there and daydream, but by daydreaming, he was living his life and he could relive his life.

• 12:45Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 12:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Multiple ways and in multiple times.

• 12:47Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One last point I want to make, because we're running out of time.

• 12:49Chuck Nice?

  Just real quick, because we're running out of time. Dr. Manhattan, I forgot also, is the, is a character who lives in his world line and also sees his world line simultaneously.

• 13:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, this is, uh, of the, uh, Dr. Manhattan from, uh, the Watchmen.

• 13:09Chuck Nice?

  Watchmen, correct.

• 13:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, yes. Excellent. Yeah, he's, that's a pretty powerful guy.

• 13:13Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man.

• 13:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, once you have him, what, why have anything, do anything?

• 13:16Chuck Nice?

  You know, that's what I don't like. That's why I don't like Watchmen, believe it or not, for what you just said. Because it's like, I got Dr. Manhattan. I mean, my answer, my answer to everything is like, seriously, bro? I got Dr. Manhattan.

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's the answer. Dr. Manhattan.

• 13:31Chuck Nice?

  It's Dr. Manhattan. It's over.

• 13:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The whole, the whole thing.

• 13:33Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 13:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now, one other quick thing.

• 13:35Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 13:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, uh, if you have an ant in a, in a square, okay?

• 13:40Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let's say there's a sticky edge. That's basically a prison for the ant.

• 13:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can tell the ant, just go up an inch and out and over. No, but the ant is stuck in two dimensions. The two dimensions of the paper that's at length and a, and a width, okay, or height or whatever. Those two dimensions, the ant is stuck.

• 13:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If he had access to the, if it had access to a third dimension, it could escape the prison, right?

• 14:03Chuck Nice?

  Because it could find height and escape, right?

• 14:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So think about it. If you are in an actual jail cell and you had access to a fourth dimension, a fourth spatial dimension, you just have to step out of the spatial, into the spatial dimension and step back in, and you just walk out of the prison without ever touching the walls. Okay, so that's how you escape prison, just invent a fourth spatial dimension to do that. So then I thought, if you need a spatial dimension for that, then what about our fourth time dimension? Why can't we, why can't that work for us, the way a fourth spatial dimension? It does. It does. Here it is, you ready? So somebody puts you in jail, and now you enter your fourth time dimension, you go

• 14:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to it, return to your time dimension, before you were put in prison.

• 14:52Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 14:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now you're not in prison, you just escaped the prison. And you do it, or after you escaped. So, that, it works the same way as the spatial dimension, if we can invent that. But I'm just, that, that's all I gotta say about that.

• 15:05Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. A better thing would do, would be to return to before you committed the crime and not commit it.

• 15:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Reverend Chuck. The moral, the moralist Reverend Chuck. So Chuck, we're out of time. In fact, we went a little over on this segment, because there was some juicy stuff in the space-time continuum. But when we come back, we'll pick up on stuff you thought you know, and we'll talk about the moon, on StarTalk.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck?

• 16:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah?

• 16:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm excited about this one, I wanna talk about the moon.

• 16:13Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 16:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm. Now, there's a lot of these where we talk about the moon, but I wanna put it all in one place, at one time, here and now.

• 16:20Chuck Nice?

  All right, that sounds good.

• 16:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 16:23Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna resist. Every.

• 16:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Moon joke, yes, every, every mooning.

• 16:29Chuck Nice?

  I am, yes, I'm, right now, I'm just putting myself in the mental space. To stop thinking about butts and cracks and all of that. I'm gonna let it go.

• 16:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get moon, okay.

• 16:41Chuck Nice?

  Let it go. All right, here we go.

• 16:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so this is mostly moon lore. I just wanna put it all under one, under one roof, okay?

• 16:48Chuck Nice?

  I love it.

• 16:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so let's start out with the moon on horizon illusion. You ever hear about that?

• 16:54Chuck Nice?

  The moon on the horizon illusion, no, I don't know, I don't think.

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so what it is, it's what we call it, maybe you, you, you felt it. You see the moon rising over the city landscape.

• 17:03Chuck Nice?

  Of course.

• 17:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's huge.

• 17:06Chuck Nice?

  Yes, it's so beautiful. It's like a big, giant, yellow ball.

• 17:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ball, right, right, and you don't have that reaction when it's up overhead.

• 17:14Chuck Nice?

  No, cuz it's a little yellow dot and. That's not impressive.

• 17:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so why does the moon feel bigger on the horizon than high in the sky? It is, it is not actually bigger at all.

• 17:26Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can measure it. In fact, it's slightly smaller for other reasons I'm not gonna get into, but it, so it's, it's completely psychological. And so we call it the moon on horizon illusion.

• 17:39Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 17:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because your brain makes a judgment at all times, how far away something is. It's making this judgment, okay?

• 17:48Chuck Nice?

  Stereopsis.

• 17:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, and based on that ju, that's yet, correct. And based on that judgment, it will say, here's how I'm big, I think that object is.

• 17:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so think about it, if you look up in the sky and you see an airplane.

• 18:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, you're not saying to yourself, oh, the airplane's only this big, it can fit between my fingers. You, you, you're not saying that.

• 18:09Chuck Nice?

  But you do take your fingers and hold it up and look, make it look like you're flying the airplane, like, you know.

• 18:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I've never done that, Chuck, yeah.

• 18:18Chuck Nice?

  Okay, all right, moving, moving on, moving on.

• 18:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry, I've never done that.

• 18:26Chuck Nice?

  Uh oh.

• 18:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, maybe others have, I don't know, I just personally, I, I don't believe I have to help the airplane.

• 18:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I felt that way very early in my life. So you know, not only intuitively, but your brain is doing subliminal calculations about how big something would actually be. Right. If it were right in front of you, for how small it is, for how far away you see it to be. Right. All right? Okay. So. That makes sense. The moon, as far as your depth perception is concerned, is basically at infinity. Okay? It's basically at infinity. That makes sense. So what happens is, the moon shows up in the company of terrestrial objects you are familiar with. Buildings, mountains, trees. You know how big those are.

• 19:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, this is fascinating. I love it. And then the moon is hanging out with them. And so your brain is saying, wait a minute, is that, is it really there? Or is that, no, but, and while your brain is trying to figure this out, your brain starts thinking, the moon is huge, huger than at any other time in the sky. Last point about the moon on the horizon, okay? What's throwing off your depth cues is the full moon mixed in with other things that are familiar to you, as I've already said. Correct, okay. If you have the full moon rising over a horizon for which you have no depth cues, the effect is greatly diminished, and in fact, it's hardly there at all.

• 20:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh. For example, the moon rising at sea. I was gonna say, on the, over the ocean. Over the open ocean, there's no trees, there's no buildings, there's nothing. So that, that effect is greatly diminished. And you wanna know how to get rid of the effect entirely? Here's what you do. There's the, the large moon on the horizon, next to buildings and things. Turn around, okay? Mm-hmm. All right? With your back to the moon. Okay. Bend over. Uh-huh. And look at the moon upside down through your legs. Okay, I get it. Okay? Okay, now, don't pull down your drawers when you're doing this, cuz then you'll be mooning the moon.

• 20:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you do this, then the buildings on the horizon and the trees are upside down. And your brain says, I don't know what that is.

• 20:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't want it upside down. I don't know what that is. Oh, so now I can put the moon where it belongs at infinity and the moon becomes its regular size.

• 21:05Chuck Nice?

  So the lack of reference causes your brain to see the moon the way it is instead of causing it to make the association to the size of the things surrounding it.

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct, correct. And so, so, so, and I invite you to do that experiment. Next time the moon looks suspiciously large on the horizon, just bend over. Bada bing. It goes right back to its size.

• 21:28Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 21:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you get two bada bings in one?

• 21:30Chuck Nice?

  And yes, you can. Chuck, what are you doing? Well, I'm looking at the moon and kissing my ass goodbye.

• 21:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So more about the moon. You know why it's yellow when it's low on the horizon?

• 21:43Chuck Nice?

  Uh, I, I, I mean, I can only guess that it's atmospheric.

• 21:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly. For the same reason the sun is yellow on the horizon. The sun isn't actually yellow. It's yellow on the horizon because the atmosphere is affecting the color. And if you have a polluted sky, it'll be deeper and deeper, deeper from yellow into amber and maybe even red. So you can get very sort of deep, deep, um, deep amber moon if it stays low. Point is, this is a moon on horizon illusion and people say, I saw such a big moon last night. I'm saying, no, you didn't. You only thought it was big.

• 22:13Chuck Nice?

  Wow. That is so cool, by the way.

• 22:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So now, so now, uh, the moon is always opposite, the full moon is, we're talking about the full moon here. It's always opposite the sun. All right. That's because, that's why it's full. It's, it's full frontal to the sun.

• 22:30Chuck Nice?

  Getting the full reflection of the sun.

• 22:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The full reflection from, from our point of view.

• 22:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On earth. Okay. So, uh, because you mentioned the moon is kind of yellowish on the horizon, yellowish amber. And I might've said this at another time, but here's a good place to re-insert it.

• 22:46Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Uh, in the summertime.

• 22:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sun is, it takes this very high arc across the sky. Okay?

• 22:57Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then when the sun sets, it takes a very low arc beneath the horizon because it doesn't stay down there very long. Well, if it takes a low arc on the horizon, if you have full moon, the full moon will be opposite it and will also be in a low arc.

• 23:14Chuck Nice?

  Uh-huh.

• 23:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now watch, so watch. In the summertime, like in June, you know, right? June, when the full moon rises, it stays low in the sky, really low. Doesn't get very high at all. So, if you, if you had sort of sunset colors on the moon right when it rose and it doesn't get very high, it's never gonna free itself of the contaminating effects, the color contamination of the sky, of our atmosphere.

• 23:46Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it'll, it'll, it'll come up, it'll be like deep amber, but it's not gonna really ever not be amber in that very low arc across the sky. And then it sets, alright? Wait a minute. The full moon in June stays low on the sky and it's, and it holds on to those sort of sunset amber colors? It takes on a kind of a honey color? Oh. Of all the moons of the year, and they all have names, the name of the full moon in June is the honeymoon.

• 24:18Chuck Nice?

  The honeymoon. What?

• 24:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bada bing.

• 24:22Chuck Nice?

  That's sweet. Oh, I feel like I should be doing something more with the moon now.

• 24:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I just wanted to bada bing the moon. Is that allowed? What bada bings in a day do I get?

• 24:35Chuck Nice?

  I don't know, I don't know if you get to bada bing the moon. Especially on the honeymoon.

• 24:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the honeymoon. So every moon has, every full moon has a name. You've heard of some, the harvest moon, this sort of thing.

• 24:46Chuck Nice?

  The flower moon, the harvest moon.

• 24:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the flower, and they're all cultural and regional, by the way. Depending on what mattered. There's a wolf moon, a snow moon, this sort of thing. So.

• 24:54Chuck Nice?

  The blood moon is my favorite.

• 24:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, don't, don't go there, please, don't.

• 24:58Chuck Nice?

  Come on, man, why not?

• 24:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's a whole other explainer. No, that, no. Just, that's a different explainer video. Back away from the term.

• 25:07Chuck Nice?

  Aw, come on.

• 25:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put the term down on the table.

• 25:10Chuck Nice?

  Right. Put down the blood moon, sir.

• 25:14Chuck Nice?

  Sir, I'm gonna ask you one last time.

• 25:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put the blood moon down.

• 25:22Chuck Nice?

  Alright.

• 25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, maybe I should. Should I slip it in here? Alright, do you know what the blood moon is?

• 25:27Chuck Nice?

  I, I'd heard of it. I don't know what it is.

• 25:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you are, how are you talking about it? You don't know what it is.

• 25:32Chuck Nice?

  Because it's my favorite term for the moon, the blood moon.

• 25:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is the term that some people invented to describe the full moon during a lunar eclipse.

• 25:43Chuck Nice?

  Yes, that's where I heard it.

• 25:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so a blood moon could then happen at any time of the year if there is a lunar eclipse. Okay?

• 25:52Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 25:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what happens in a lunar eclipse? Earth interposes itself between the sun and the moon.

• 26:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so exactly interposes itself in such a way.

• 26:06Chuck Nice?

  And the moon is like, the moon is like, yo, hold me back, hold me back. And the sun is like, you better hold him back. Cause I'm about to mess him up bad. He's like, and the earth is like.

• 26:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, Chuck is from Philadelphia.

• 26:20Chuck Nice?

  And the earth is like, guys, guys, come on, seriously, guys.

• 26:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's always what the person who's stopping the fight sounds like.

• 26:28Chuck Nice?

  Why? Why is the person stopping the fight? Oh, guys, guys, come on, guys, come on, guys, seriously.

• 26:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's never stop the fight, right? The person who sounds like that never stops fights, they start them. Alright, so what should happen? So we are in space. Earth is, and people say, I want to go to space, just stand on earth, you're in space. Alright, so earth is in space and there's a shadow that's always there cast by the sun.

• 26:51Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 26:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, now you have the moon orbiting the earth and occasionally the moon will enter that shadow.

• 26:57Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 26:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Blocking the light of the sun from the fully illuminated moon. And we have a lunar eclipse.

• 27:05Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 27:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A lunar eclipse, okay. So if you were to watch this from the moon, you'll see this dark orb move slowly and begin to blot out the sun. Okay. The earth is much bigger than the sun on the sky. Alright, so it is, it, the sun is lost behind the earth. Again, let's watch this from the moon now, okay, so now, here's what happens. Sunlight.

• 27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tries to get around to the other side by working its way through Earth's atmosphere. Right, okay. So the light sort of disperses and refracts a little. Almost like a filter, or again. It's some kind of thing, but it's only around the edges. Edges, right. Because the full disk of the sun is blocked by the moon. By the moon, right, right. So it's just light that's trying to work its way around. Nice. If you have a heavy, heavily polluted atmosphere. Okay. Then that sunlight gets deeply reddened. Oh. As you'd have a deep red sun on our settings at sunset. Right, just like it would be on the horizon, right. Just like it would be on the horizon, okay? Just like it would be, because the sun technically is on the horizon for that picture, all right?

• 28:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you have a highly polluted, or it's over the Sahara where there's a lot of dust particles kicked up, then it deeply reddens the sunlight that leaks around the Earth. And some of that spills into Earth's shadow. Gotcha. And so the moon, which would otherwise be completely blotted out. Now. Can take on a very deep sort of amber. A ruddy look. A ruddy, ruddy, ruddy, but, okay. That can happen. I saw it happen several times in the 1960s and early 70s, and I have not seen that happen since. Ooh. We've been cleaning up the air of the Earth. Oh. Because what makes the sun deeply red, people say, "Oh, beautiful look." No, because the air got particles in it, okay? Oh, man.

• 28:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're breathing pollutants, you're breathing particulates, all right? So that's what's reddening the sun. You have less of that, the sun is less red, in a lunar eclipse. I have not seen a red moon lunar eclipse in 40 years. Ooh. But they say blood red, and plus it's not red, it's like a deep amber, all right? It's not any more red than someone who has red hair. Is it actually red? No, it's more than, it's just rusty color. Hold it to a red, is it that red? No. Right. No. That's right, you little ginger kid, you. Yeah, so what happens is people exaggerate the color of other people, right? Alright, and so when they're being described, white people aren't purely white, black people aren't purely black. And we have a word for how much light you reflect, it's called albedo, by the way. Okay.

• 29:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Albedo. So albedo of one means you reflect all the light. Right. Albedo of zero means you absorb all the light. Well. Anyway, that's another explainer, we'll get to that. That's awesome. So, here's my point, so that's how you would get a red moon. And people want to say blood. So I've seen people who are very taken by vocabulary, by word, "A blood red moon, that means something bad is gonna happen." Yeah. Just because somebody misnamed it, doesn't mean you now get to take the word and create a whole system of cultism around the word that someone badly chose to describe an object in the sky. Well, thank you for making me hate blood moons now. Alright. And went from my favorite to the worst.

• 30:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying, so what'll happen is the moon gets eclipsed and it just basically disappears from the sky. In fact, most people who have ever witnessed a lunar eclipse didn't even know they were... didn't even know. Right. Because it looks like you have a crescent moon. The earth's shadow is curved, and it just looks like a crescent moon. And it gets a little dimmer, and then it just disappears completely. And then you don't even notice it, until it sort of reemerges on the other side. So, a lunar eclipse is long and boring and hardly noticed by anybody who isn't looking for it. It's just a reality check. Go shoot the messenger. Alright, that's all the time for that segment, but when we come back, we're gonna talk about the sun. Who's sun? Your sun or my sun? Uh! We both have sons, Neil. Uh! The sun. Oh!

• 31:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sun. Nice. Don't get all homonymic on me here. Alright, we'll be right back.

• 31:28Chuck Nice?

  All right, it's time for a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons. Ian Conkle, Panda Man, I'm not making that up, and Manuel Zamarita Jr. Hey, guys. Thank you for your gravity assist as we make our way across the cosmos. And for those of you listening who would like your very own Patreon shout out, please go to patreon.com/stargtloradio and support us.

• 32:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, we're back. Yes. All right, we talked about spacetime and we talked about the moon. Right. Well, you can't talk about the moon without talking about... The sun. The sun. So let's get some sun action here. But it may be just things you didn't know but are glad you learned. Yes. Rather than things you thought you knew. So there's a risk of that, but I think it'll still be fun, but that's not for me to judge. Let's step right into it. Gotta like the sun. It's only the source of all life on Earth. Almost all life. Well, not all life, but mostly all life. Yeah, there's some life at the bottom of the ocean. At the bottom, right. That never gets, that never even sees the sun. I wonder what that's like. It lives where the sun don't shine.

• 32:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's funny.

• 32:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. In the water where the sun don't shine. So, you know, that has me wondering. What happens if you're just a fish swimming in the water? And then someone captures you, pulls you out of the water into the air, and then there's like land and mountains and sky and clouds and direct sunlight? That's the closest thing I can think of to someone grabbing you out of your dimension and putting you somewhere else. Right. But here's what's worse. They pull you out, but then they put you back in the water.

• 33:24Chuck Nice?

  Right? And now you're going around to all the other fish like, yo, man, I'm serious.

• 33:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This really happened to me.

• 33:30Chuck Nice?

  This happened to me, man. Okay? Like, first I thought it was some food, right? They grabbed my jaw, wouldn't let me go. I fought and I fought. They pulled me out, man. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe, man. And then it was like, oh, this light. I don't even know what to call it. It hurt. It hurt like hell, man. And it was these things, the fleshy things, man. And it, oh, it was crazy. And it was like, like, you know what? You know, like the bottom, what we see down the bottom? Except instead of sand, it was like sand, but it was real hard and and then it was like puffy stuff above the sand and it was, oh, man. Dude, I'm not crazy.

• 34:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, you are.

• 34:10Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 34:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what we're gonna do? We're gonna get someone to animate that, that have an actual fish speaking those words, alright?

• 34:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, anyhow, yeah, so one of the things they get to really experience is the sun. Particularly if they live sort of, if they're bottom feeders, right? The sun is not a big part of their life, really. So, so let me talk about the sun. The sun is, uh, you know how far away it is in light travel time?

• 34:36Chuck Nice?

  Um, eight and something minutes?

• 34:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, good, good. Yeah, Chuck, you know, you're coming along here.

• 34:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it takes 500 seconds for the light to reach Earth from the sun. So 500 seconds, if you do the math, it's eight minutes and 20 seconds. Alright, and it's moving at the speed of light through the vacuum of space. So that's, that's kinda cool. And, but you know something? Earth's gravitational influence also moves at that speed. So if some giant came along and plucked the sun from the center of our solar system.

• 35:12Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 35:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We would continue to see the sun, feel the sun, orbit the sun.

• 35:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Until eight minutes and 20 seconds passes.

• 35:24Chuck Nice?

  Oh, and then the party is over.

• 35:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Over, that's all she wrote.

• 35:28Chuck Nice?

  Like you ain't never seen a party end.

• 35:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so what then happens is the planets, one by one, will fling off into interstellar space and plunge into eternal darkness.

• 35:41Chuck Nice?

  Woo, that is a needle scratch if I ever heard one, man.

• 35:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm, and so we need a sci-fi story where somebody just reaches in and plucks the sun out and just watches what happened and how we are in our blissful ignorance for eight minutes and 20 seconds.

• 35:55Chuck Nice?

  You know what, that's another great short film. It's like, you know, you show that and then you show like the beauty of life in real time of eight minutes and 20 seconds.

• 36:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And only you, the viewer, knows.

• 36:10Chuck Nice?

  Knows, that it's all going to end.

• 36:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, they can't know that any sooner than when it's too late.

• 36:16Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 36:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that's the rate at which the information is coming.

• 36:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, ooh, that's creepy. I love it, I love it.

• 36:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so the sun, just little tidbits about the sun, so maybe it might not be something you thought you knew, but it might be something you glad you learned. How about that?

• 36:33Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow.

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, all right. So if you hollowed out the sun.

• 36:40Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 36:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now you just have the volume of the sun. And then I sort of played a little basketball and started tossing Earths into the sun. Do you know how many Earths would fit in the sun?

• 36:52Chuck Nice?

  I know the sun is huge compared to the Earth.

• 36:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Huge, huge.

• 36:58Chuck Nice?

  I don't know how many Earths would fit.

• 36:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Take a guess, how many? Like 10, 100, 1000?

• 37:02Chuck Nice?

  No, I will say.

• 37:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thousand Earths, give me a number.

• 37:05Chuck Nice?

  More than a thousand Earths. I'm trying to, I'm looking at the scale models of all the things that I've seen of like.

• 37:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 37:13Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 37:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the ceiling of your kids who did the planet project.

• 37:16Chuck Nice?

  Yes, exactly, do the little planet things, you know? I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say 100,000 Earths.

• 37:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's a lot of Earths, right?

• 37:24Chuck Nice?

  That's too many Earths.

• 37:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, 100,000 Earths. So the actual number, the actual number is about a million.

• 37:31Chuck Nice?

  What?

• 37:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's about a million Earths. Damn. A million. And so the weird thing is, you go back in time before we had any sense of anything, and there are people thinking that the sun is just something else in the sky, but Earth is the Earth is the thing, right? We are the center. Right. And since Earth and the moon are the same size on the sky. Right. Earth and the moon had almost equal presence in our culture. Right? There's a moon god and a sun god, of course. You know, there it was. And any illustrations of the two of them, they're the same size, because they look that way. But they are nowhere commensurate with each other. And it wasn't until much later that anybody figured out that the moon does not give its own light.

• 38:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is only reflected sunlight. Only. So there's a geometry of things going on there. But some of that comes from the Bible, where, I forgot which passage, but it's, and the sun, it's in Genesis, of course. And God created the sun to light the day and the moon to light the night, as though they are their own agencies of light sources. But that's not the case. Plus, the moon isn't always out at night. And mostly, in equal amount of time, it's out in broad daylight. Right. As it is out at night. So, just saying. So, a million times larger. So that is huge. The sun has blemishes, which we call what? Sunspots. Sunspots.

• 39:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're like liver spots, except the sun has really good skin.

• 39:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So the sun only occasionally has the liver spots, but has a really good dermatologist, is what you're telling me. Alright. So, the sun, so sunspots are about the size of Earth.

• 39:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the sun has acne bigger than Earth. Oh my goodness. Yeah. That's crazy. That's cold. That's, that's, that's, now, sunspots, even though they're dark, they have, give a lot of energy in high energy, um, they give a lot of high energy radiation. So they'll go off a lot of ultraviolet and even, I think some X-rays. I'd have to double check that. Wow. When the sunspot population grows, this, we say the sun is active. It's going through its cycles. The sun, it has an 11-year cycle. Okay. And it's, where there aren't many sunspots, and then there's a bunch of sunspots, and then there aren't many, usually zero, actually. Is it more moody? Is it more moody?

• 40:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know. I haven't asked. Actually, well, no, yes, it is more moody. During sunspots, yes. Yes. Because during sunspots, not only is the sun radiate more, and this affects Earth's atmosphere, the atmosphere absorbs this extra radiation, heats up, thickens, and all of our orbiting satellites now have to boost themselves more back to their orbit because it eats, it encounters more atmospheric resistance. Look at that. So we do that with the space station, with the Hubble telescope, and anybody else up there who wants to stay and maintain an orbit, a stable orbit, during solar max, it's called, we're on the walk, we're on the lookout for a decay of our orbits

• 40:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  because the, the atmosphere got thickened by this extra radiation. By the extra radiation. Oh wow, that is really. Okay, so that's one moody thing. It's messing with our satellites, okay? That's one sun-blamable thing. What else happens is there are solar flares. Yes. So explosions on the sun. And these explosions, the sun is, is a, is a magnetically charged gas. Right. And the word for that is plasma. Yeah. Plasma, yeah, yeah. So, so, and magnetic fields are all entangled in there. And during solar maximum, the magnetic fields become so entangled, they bust out. Nice. And when they bust out, the particles of the plasma like hanging on to that magnetic field.

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they get flung into space, and then you get waves of particles towards the Earth. There are always waves of particles. We call it the solar wind. But during these particular moments, when you get a solar flare, oh my gosh, this, the, the, the level of charged particles can be so high, it can short circuit the electronics of satellites when it reaches Earth.

• 41:58Chuck Nice?

  That's crazy. That's awesome.

• 42:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, the sun is moody at that time. I'm just making it clear.

• 42:03Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 42:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, solar flares can happen, but they don't always point towards Earth.

• 42:08Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can see them, but the pat, the plasma pie goes out into space. So it's the ones where there's a solar flare and it's headed towards Earth that we keep track of.

• 42:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in fact, NASA has a whole department called, it's space weather. It's a space weather department.

• 42:23Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 42:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's things that would affect astronauts in space. And it's not only the sun, it's also, is there anything happening in the rest of the galaxy? So, uh, that's, so it's another thing that the sun is doing. Oh, I, I, one other thing.

• 42:36Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 42:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Sunspots are always in pairs.

• 42:41Chuck Nice?

  Okay, I did not know this.

• 42:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we figured out how to measure the magnetic fields of the sunspots. Cause we knew it was related to the magnetic activities. And so Chuck, we measured it and one would have a positive charge, the other negative charge. So we got magnets on the sun.

• 42:54Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 42:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just saying. Uh, but, but wait, there's more. Okay?

• 42:58Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 42:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sun is a big ball of gas, so it's not solid the way Earth is.

• 43:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so it turns out the equator of the sun completes one revolution faster than other latitudes on the sun.

• 43:11Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 43:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it doesn't rotate as a solid object.

• 43:14Chuck Nice?

  Look at that because it's a big ball of gas. So the middle could be going faster than the tops.

• 43:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 43:21Chuck Nice?

  Ah, that's cool.

• 43:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, just to be clear, it is always physically going faster because it has more distance to travel.

• 43:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So even if the sun were solid, it would be traveling faster the way equatorial residents on Earth.

• 43:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're all traveling a thousand miles an hour.

• 43:35Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We here in the middle, like New York latitudes are traveling only about 800 miles an hour due east. Right. Because they, we both complete a circle at the same time.

• 43:43Chuck Nice?

  Same time.

• 43:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they went a bigger distance.

• 43:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they've got to be traveling faster. Okay. It's the merry-go-round effect. The outer courses are moving faster on the merry-go-round than the inner ones, even though it's moving as a solid, rotating as a solid object. With the sun, the equator rotates faster. Now that, here's, here's the rub, so watch what happens. Because the entire ball is magnetically charged, and there are magnetic fields within it, the magnetic field wants to hold on to the plasma. And the rotating sun says, no, you don't. I'm going to stretch you as I, what we say, differentially rotate.

• 44:19Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 44:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and as that happens, the magnetic fields stretch and stretch and stretch, and there's a point where they can no longer stay attached. And they snap. And this snapping is a very complicated magnetohydrodynamical mechanism, but the disruption of the orderly magnetic fields are what punches through to make, to make this, the flares on the surface of the sun.

• 44:44Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 44:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when everybody punches out and they get it out of the system, the magnetic fields reconnect and we start the cycle again. But wait, when the cycle repeats? Okay, oh, by the way, the sun has a north pole and a south pole in addition to all of this, just so you know.

• 44:58Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 44:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but when the cycle repeats, the entire magnetic field of the sun has flipped.

• 45:05Chuck Nice?

  Oh, snap!

• 45:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's in fact a 22-year complete cycle, not an 11-year cycle.

• 45:13Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 45:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 45:14Chuck Nice?

  That is amazing.

• 45:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, the sun is doing all that while you're sitting out there, you know, on the beach.

• 45:19Chuck Nice?

  While I'm getting beautiful.

• 45:24Chuck Nice?

  It does all that, and it makes me look good, too.

• 45:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so let me, I gotta quote Galileo before we run out of time here. Uh, Galileo said, I'm paraphrasing, because he said it more poetically than I'm about to recount. "The sun manages to keep the planets in their appointed paths."

• 45:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yet somehow manages to ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the world to do.

• 45:48Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's, yo, that Galileo, he knew how to turn a phrase, that's for sure.

• 45:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And my boy was a wine drinker, so that's what he's talking about.

• 45:55Chuck Nice?

  I know.

• 45:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's thinking about what else you do with them grapes.

• 45:58Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. That's pretty, that's cool.

• 46:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, that's all the sun I could squeeze into 15 minutes here.

• 46:05Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man, that was fun.

• 46:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's enough for you. All right. All right, Chuck, so that was the stuff you didn't know but maybe glad you learned, rather than stuff you thought you knew. So, all right, all it quits there, Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, keep looking up.