Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the vault. This time it's going
Speaker 1: to be part two of the episode we ran last Saturday.
Speaker 1: This is the second part of the Lost Daughters of
Speaker 1: Oton series. This originally published March nineteen. And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: if you were here last Saturday, you know what you're
Speaker 1: in for. All right, let's jump right in. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
Speaker 1: you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Can we're back
Speaker 1: for part two? Or is this part two? Or does
Speaker 1: it kind of stand alone to a large time? I
Speaker 1: think this one stands alone. Yeah, okay, so well last time,
Speaker 1: if you were with us in the last episode, we
Speaker 1: were exploring what we were sort of calling the Lost
Speaker 1: Daughters of Aton, the the planets that once were thought
Speaker 1: to exist somewhere in the Solar System, whether in ancient
Speaker 1: times or in recent centuries, but we later found out
Speaker 1: probably never existed or definitely never existed in some cases.
Speaker 1: So examples we talked about included Antikathon and the Central Fire.
Speaker 1: What was the deal with that? Oh, well, you just
Speaker 1: have to go back and listen to the episode. But yeah,
Speaker 1: this complex notion where, um, the Sun is not the
Speaker 1: center of the universe, the Earth is not the center
Speaker 1: of the universe, but something called the Central Fire is
Speaker 1: at the center, and Earth is actually closer to the
Speaker 1: Central Fire than the Sun. So it's you know, this
Speaker 1: sort of complex uh model of the cosmos based on uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the best observational data of the day of
Speaker 1: like ancient times, ancient Greece. Yeah, combined with certain religious
Speaker 1: mythological ideas. Yeah, Pythagorean cosmology sort of. But then also
Speaker 1: we talked about the scientific thinking that to the belief
Speaker 1: in such a thing as the planet vulcan, a planet
Speaker 1: believed to be inside the orbit of Mercury super close
Speaker 1: to the Sun, as was proposed by Urban la Verier.
Speaker 1: And of course we also talked about Phaeton, the the
Speaker 1: Phaeton or Phaeton the the best subject of a Renaissance
Speaker 1: painting of all time. Yes, but for the purposes of
Speaker 1: main purposes of our discussion, the the idea that that
Speaker 1: they thought, well, the asteroid belt maybe used to be
Speaker 1: a planet and maybe this is this is what we
Speaker 1: would call that planet if it were still a whole
Speaker 1: exactly right. So today we wanted to carry this discussion
Speaker 1: forward to talk about other ideas about planets that are
Speaker 1: thought to maybe exist somewhere in the Solar System but
Speaker 1: haven't yet been confirmed. In the last episode, all the
Speaker 1: planets that we talked about, we're pretty sure now have
Speaker 1: never existed at any time. I mean, with two of them,
Speaker 1: were quite sure, but there are still questions. For example,
Speaker 1: there has long been a question about what lies at
Speaker 1: the further stretches we we talked about. You know, what
Speaker 1: happens when you go down as far as you can
Speaker 1: into the Solar System, like the Sun, is this pit
Speaker 1: this well where you go all the way down? Are
Speaker 1: there are things that are hard to see because they're
Speaker 1: so close to the Sun. When you think about the
Speaker 1: opposite end, could there be things that are hard for
Speaker 1: us to see because they're so far And of course
Speaker 1: we have to realize how how confusing this may seem
Speaker 1: at first, because it's easy to think that we have
Speaker 1: our Solar system pretty much figured out at this point, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, mostly if you're listening to this, you probably
Speaker 1: grew up memorizing the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Urinous, Neptune.
Speaker 1: And then there's the whole issue of Pluto, and some
Speaker 1: of us get a little bit out of shape, right
Speaker 1: when when someone tells us, actually, Pluto isn't a full
Speaker 1: fledged planet, it's more of a dwarf planet, etcetera. And uh,
Speaker 1: you know when when maybe don't roll with change all that. Well,
Speaker 1: but it's easy to think, Okay, but that's it, right,
Speaker 1: there's nothing new to discover in the Solar System, because meanwhile,
Speaker 1: we are continue really spotting new exo planets that are
Speaker 1: light years upon light years away, like far distant reaches
Speaker 1: of the observable universe. So if we're figuring that out,
Speaker 1: then surely we've got everything squared away in our immediate neighborhood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it only makes sense that that's the way it should go. Right,
Speaker 1: Why are we seeing exo planets when there's still a
Speaker 1: question of whether there could be a planet in our
Speaker 1: own Solar system we don't know about. And unfortunately that's
Speaker 1: just a side effect of the different ways we have
Speaker 1: of detecting things. It actually may be much easier to
Speaker 1: detect the presence of a planet orbiting a distant star
Speaker 1: because you can definitely see that star, and you can
Speaker 1: tell by certain things. You can tell by if the
Speaker 1: star wobbles, if there are other gravitational influences on that star.
Speaker 1: You can tell by the what's known as the transit method,
Speaker 1: if something is passing in front of the star from
Speaker 1: our perspective and causing it too dim. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: I was thinking about it this way. Um, I was
Speaker 1: thinking of beach houses. Imagine you're staying in one beach house,
Speaker 1: you know size a ble beach house, and they tend
Speaker 1: to be you know, with lots of lots of beds
Speaker 1: for multiple families or groups to stay and at the
Speaker 1: same time, so you're in one beach house, and then
Speaker 1: you're adjacent to another beach house and you you you
Speaker 1: gaze out at the other beach house. You see some
Speaker 1: lights on and you ask yourself, I wonder if anyone
Speaker 1: is staying there, and you observe it until you find
Speaker 1: definite signs that there is an individual in that house,
Speaker 1: and then then maybe you can count how many individuals
Speaker 1: are in that house. But then if you ask the
Speaker 1: same question about your own beach house, well then you can.
Speaker 1: There are ways to try and figure that out, but
Speaker 1: not the same, not the same ways. Right. You might
Speaker 1: do a bit of listening. You might do a bit
Speaker 1: of roaming around, of of rattling the curiously locked doors
Speaker 1: that go who knows where. That's a really good analogy.
Speaker 1: I like that a lot. And so by running around
Speaker 1: within our own house, we have discovered by say the
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundred, late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, we
Speaker 1: had discovered a lot stuff. We discovered eight planets at
Speaker 1: that point. The first six planets Mercury, Venus, of course, Earth, Mars, Jupiter,
Speaker 1: and Saturn have been known about since ancient times. The
Speaker 1: ancient astronomers with the naked eye could see them in
Speaker 1: the night sky and charted their movements and all that.
Speaker 1: Then in seventeen eighty one you had Uranus or Uranus.
Speaker 1: We still have to decide which one we truly prefer.
Speaker 1: Uranus was found by Sir William Herschel with a telescope.
Speaker 1: He wanted to name it after King George, and fortunately
Speaker 1: that didn't happen. Uh. Then Laveryer, the French astronomer, predicted
Speaker 1: the placement of Neptune by the wobble in Uranus um
Speaker 1: and he said, I predict there's another planet here and
Speaker 1: you can find it. And then they went and looked
Speaker 1: for it and they did find it. And that was
Speaker 1: in the eighteen forties. So we're up to seven planets
Speaker 1: at this point by the eighteen forties. By the way,
Speaker 1: as long as we're snickering at at the planetary name Uranus,
Speaker 1: I do want to throw in to call back to
Speaker 1: an older episode that I hope that one day someone
Speaker 1: writes a science fiction tale in which a starship is
Speaker 1: headed towards Uranus and it's called the Guy a Bolga.
Speaker 1: That would be a great ship title there. That is brilliant.
Speaker 1: That is absolutely brilliant. Wait a minute, I think I said.
Speaker 1: Did I say a minute ago that Neptune was the
Speaker 1: seventh planet. I feel like I've got that ringing in
Speaker 1: my head for some reason. If I said that, that's
Speaker 1: entirely wrong. Neptune is the eighth planet. Obviously. Uh So,
Speaker 1: I apologies if I misspoke. If not, this is just
Speaker 1: maybe something we can edit out. Sorry I had to
Speaker 1: say that before I forgot, But yes, the Guy Bolga,
Speaker 1: that that should be the ship to Uranus. Absolutely much
Speaker 1: more evocative and resonant than Voyager two or whatever they've
Speaker 1: previously used. But let's pull it back and meet a guy.
Speaker 1: You ready to meet a guy A mustachio gentleman. Yes, okay,
Speaker 1: so it is time to meet a fellow by the
Speaker 1: name of Perceval Lowell. I think we visited this guy
Speaker 1: on the podcast before. That mustache does look familiar. So
Speaker 1: Perceval Lowell was born to a wealthy, prominent family in
Speaker 1: Boston in eighteen fifty five, the Lowell family. So he
Speaker 1: was brother of a Lawrence Lowell, who was a lawyer
Speaker 1: who ended up becoming president of Harvard University. He was
Speaker 1: also the brother I didn't realize this until recently of
Speaker 1: the poet Amy Lowell, who I guess is considered a
Speaker 1: modernist poet. She sometimes called an imagist. Um. But I
Speaker 1: picked out one of her poems because it had an
Speaker 1: image that seemed maybe a bit relevant to today. Um.
Speaker 1: The poem is called Balls. I'm not gonna quote the
Speaker 1: whole thing, but she writes, throw the blue ball above
Speaker 1: the little twigs of the tree tops, and cast the
Speaker 1: yellow ball straight at the buzzing stars. All our life
Speaker 1: is a flinging of colored balls to impossible distances. I
Speaker 1: think the image there is that all our life is
Speaker 1: a flinging of colored balls, like we're doing the flinging.
Speaker 1: But you could also think of it is that everything
Speaker 1: that human life is is being flung around on a
Speaker 1: colored ball in the void of space. Yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: the whole human experience, just right there on the surface
Speaker 1: of this weird ball among other weird balls. It's always
Speaker 1: a weird thing to consider. I mean, I know a
Speaker 1: Sagan point that out about like the picture of the Earth.
Speaker 1: When you take a picture of the Earth, everything human
Speaker 1: there has ever been is in that picture. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: pale blue dot that contains our beginning and may well
Speaker 1: contain our end. But anyway, back to Amy's brother, Perceval,
Speaker 1: so Perceval loll. I think in his early days, I guess,
Speaker 1: since he was sort of a man about town, except
Speaker 1: town was like the whole world, and especially like the
Speaker 1: eastern part of Asia. Like, he traveled a lot of
Speaker 1: international fleneur maybe um and he he traveled through the
Speaker 1: eighteen eighties and the eighteen nineties, and at one point
Speaker 1: became foreign Secretary to the Korean Special Mission to the
Speaker 1: United States. But then later in the eighteen nineties, Perceval
Speaker 1: Lowell became more and more fascinated with astronomy, particularly with
Speaker 1: the planet Mars. And there was something interesting going on
Speaker 1: in the late eighteen hundreds with the planet Mars. There
Speaker 1: was this Italian astronomer named Giovanni Chaparelli who had been
Speaker 1: studying the planet Mars through a telescope and he perceived
Speaker 1: what looked to him like a series of lines on
Speaker 1: the surface of the planet that he in eighteen seventy
Speaker 1: seven called canally, an Italian word meaning channels. But apparently
Speaker 1: these canally were taken by some English speaking audiences to
Speaker 1: be canals, kind of a false cognate inference, as in
Speaker 1: canals like in Venice, artificial structures made by intelligent tool
Speaker 1: using creatures like us, And this idea kind of became
Speaker 1: a sensation, right, Yeah, this this had a tremendous effect
Speaker 1: on on the way we perceived the planet Mars. I mean,
Speaker 1: its effects are still felt today in the way we
Speaker 1: think about Mars, despite everything that we've learned since then. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: why how come when we talk about aliens the go
Speaker 1: to is to talk about Martians. Especially in the early
Speaker 1: twentieth centuries, it was always Martians, and when Venusians or
Speaker 1: anything like that, I mean, occasionally Venusians would pop up,
Speaker 1: but it's not Santa Claus versus the Venusians. It's Santa
Speaker 1: Claus versus the Martians. Yeah, or in War of the World.
Speaker 1: You know why, why the Martians? The Martian threat? Exactly. So,
Speaker 1: the the idea of alien canals on Mars really got
Speaker 1: Perceval Lowell's gears cranking, and he decided to turn his
Speaker 1: attention and his wealth and his resources to astronomy in
Speaker 1: the eighteen nineties, and in doing this he founded the
Speaker 1: Lowell Observatory and Flagstaff, Arizona, still there today. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: Flagstaff is certainly a great place to gaze at the
Speaker 1: stars and just a cool place in general. I like
Speaker 1: Flagstaff so personal. Lowell became a passionate defender of the
Speaker 1: idea that there was or had been, intelligent civilization on Mars,
Speaker 1: and he put this theory forward in a bunch of
Speaker 1: published writings, using observations from the Lowell Observatory to back
Speaker 1: up his argument. And so I want to quote from
Speaker 1: his nineteen sixteen New York Times obituary with a few abridgements.
Speaker 1: The author rights quote the great controversy among astronomers, in
Speaker 1: which he played a leading part, began in nineteen oh
Speaker 1: seven after his announcement that the observations made by his
Speaker 1: astro comical station proved that Mars was inhabited. Professor Lowell
Speaker 1: had put the theory forward tentatively as early as eighteen.
Speaker 1: Many imminent astronomers in this country in Europe accepted his
Speaker 1: conclusions of nineteen o seven as unassailable. Others were skeptical.
Speaker 1: Professor Lowell's theory begins with the demonstration that the primary
Speaker 1: requisites for human life exists on the planet water, heat,
Speaker 1: and atmosphere. His positive proof of the existence of human
Speaker 1: life on Mars is the network of lines which marks
Speaker 1: certain areas of the planet's face, indicating the digging of
Speaker 1: artificial canals, which would require an intelligence and engineering skill
Speaker 1: as great or greater than possessed by the inhabitants of
Speaker 1: this Earth. So I think he's making a few jumps here, Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the main jump, of course, is that is
Speaker 1: that there are no such canals, and uh. And the
Speaker 1: more we looked at Mars, and then ultimately as we
Speaker 1: began to to send probes to the Red planet, it
Speaker 1: became increasingly clear that there are absolutely no canals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when we we got photos of Mars from a probe
Speaker 1: in the nineteen seventies which showed yeah, definitely not nothing there,
Speaker 1: right and and uh and you know we talked about
Speaker 1: this before in the show, and you know, dealing with
Speaker 1: early observations, there is a there's more room to see
Speaker 1: things that are not there, especially if you don't have
Speaker 1: the ability to really kept being a do any photography
Speaker 1: at all. It's so it's very observational and then very
Speaker 1: and then you're very easy to maybe think you see
Speaker 1: something or misremember something you've seen, or or in fact,
Speaker 1: the more you look at it see faint signs of
Speaker 1: the thing you want to see. Yeah, there's so much
Speaker 1: interesting stuff in the history of astronomy about things people
Speaker 1: said they saw during the days of earlier optical telescopes
Speaker 1: without modern instruments and modern uh telephotography, where like the
Speaker 1: ash and Light remember that episode, and the planet Vulcan itself.
Speaker 1: You know that wasn't just predicted like people said they
Speaker 1: saw the planet Vulcan up there by the sun during
Speaker 1: an eclipse. Who knows what they actually saw, but clearly
Speaker 1: the process of astronomical observation was was much cruder back then,
Speaker 1: but Little's Little's argument is kind of funny. So he
Speaker 1: says astronomers can see white surfaces on the poles of Mars, right,
Speaker 1: and he says that these are ice caps, and in
Speaker 1: a way that he's correct about that there are ice
Speaker 1: caps on Mars. But he said they would melt and
Speaker 1: shrink in summer and then freeze and grow larger again
Speaker 1: in winter. And so he observed that the Martian spring
Speaker 1: came and the ice melted, and at that point the
Speaker 1: dark lines or the canals would grow darker quote even
Speaker 1: showing straight black lines criss crossed over the surface and
Speaker 1: over the surface of the orange ochre areas. Uh and
Speaker 1: that he said, these dark lines would disappear again in
Speaker 1: the Martian autumn. And he concluded from this that the
Speaker 1: darkened areas around the canals were flourishing with plant life
Speaker 1: bearing leaves and grasses during the summer, which had died
Speaker 1: away again in the winter when the water froze up
Speaker 1: and became scarce. And from this he argued that Mars
Speaker 1: must have been a very parched planet where water is
Speaker 1: in high demand, which meant that the people who lived
Speaker 1: there would have had to make very careful use of
Speaker 1: a highly limited water supply, or else quote would find
Speaker 1: themselves at last face to face with the relentlessness of
Speaker 1: a scarcity of water, constantly growing greater, until at last
Speaker 1: they would all die of thirst, either directly or indirectly,
Speaker 1: for either they themselves would not have water enough to drink,
Speaker 1: or the plants or animals which constituted their diet would
Speaker 1: perish for lack of it. An alternative of small choice
Speaker 1: to them, unless they were conventionally particular as to their
Speaker 1: mode of death. So Lowell concluded that they had to
Speaker 1: build canals on Mars, that only irrigation on a vast
Speaker 1: scale could prevent the Martians from dying from a lack
Speaker 1: of water, and thus the proof of the existence of
Speaker 1: civilization on the surface of Mars. Well, it's a fun argument,
Speaker 1: and I love the world building off but if you know,
Speaker 1: if they were just purely science fiction, that that would
Speaker 1: be marvelous. But as we've already touched on, uh, evidence
Speaker 1: did not support this theory. Yeah, and there were skeptics
Speaker 1: at the time. We should say, it wasn't like everybody
Speaker 1: believed this until we had a Mars probe, Like take
Speaker 1: photos of the surface from up close. Right, though, certainly
Speaker 1: one of these possibilities is far more exciting than the other,
Speaker 1: so you can understand why that one would be the
Speaker 1: one that the idea of canals on Mars would be uh,
Speaker 1: the idea that would show up in more headlines and
Speaker 1: would and would capture the collective imagination, right uh. And
Speaker 1: and Lowell's career of influential, controversial, and sometimes incorrect observations
Speaker 1: and hypotheses did not in there there was an interesting
Speaker 1: thing I came across where Lowell also believed that once,
Speaker 1: while observing the planet Venus, he saw quote spokes radiating
Speaker 1: from a hub within the planet Venus. But in a
Speaker 1: two thousand three paper by Sheehann and Dobbins Uh, the
Speaker 1: authors argued that what actually probably happened here is that
Speaker 1: because of the way he manipulated the telescope to look
Speaker 1: at Venus, he had accidentally converted it into a crude opthalmoscope,
Speaker 1: which would have been showing him images of the blood
Speaker 1: vessels within his own eyeball. Oh my goodness, and you
Speaker 1: included an image and in our notes here for me
Speaker 1: to look at here, and it does line up rather
Speaker 1: well with the arteries of the eye. Yeah, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't stop there either. So Lowell was also in the
Speaker 1: planet predicting business. And we'll discuss his planet predictions when
Speaker 1: we get back from a break. Thank alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: So thus far we've talked about Lowell's thoughts concerning um Mars,
Speaker 1: a known planet, but now we're gonna get into the unknown.
Speaker 1: We get into into the study and the prediction of
Speaker 1: of of hypothetical planets. Yeah, and remember how the eighth
Speaker 1: planet Neptune had been discovered. Again, uh Laveryer looked at
Speaker 1: the orbit of Uranus and said, Okay, by the way
Speaker 1: it's moving, we can tell something is influencing it. It's
Speaker 1: not moving based on what our predictions should be. So
Speaker 1: what if we pause it another another object out there
Speaker 1: of a certain mass and a certain position, Then we
Speaker 1: could explain why Uranis moves the way it does. And
Speaker 1: so he posited Neptune, and it turned out Neptune was there.
Speaker 1: He was correct, and so this is a fantastically useful
Speaker 1: and successful prediction based on the laws of physics. So,
Speaker 1: in the early years of the twentieth century, after studying
Speaker 1: the orbits of the outer gas, giants like Uranus and Neptune,
Speaker 1: Lowell tried to do the same thing. He concluded that
Speaker 1: there was another planet yet to be found based on
Speaker 1: those orbits. Something out there is messing with Uranus and Neptune.
Speaker 1: And yet again, like with the correct prediction of Neptune
Speaker 1: and the incorrect prediction of Vulcan by la Verier, this
Speaker 1: was on that basis, on the basis of inferred gravitational
Speaker 1: influences on the orbits of these known objects. So in
Speaker 1: nineteen o five or nineteen o six, Percival Lowell initiated
Speaker 1: a massive hunt for this ghost planet. The project was
Speaker 1: initially called the Invariable Plane Search, and the ghost planet
Speaker 1: was called Planet X. And this project went on for
Speaker 1: many years. It proceeded in stops and star throughout several phases,
Speaker 1: even after Perceval Lowell himself actually passed away in nineteen sixteen.
Speaker 1: So Perceval Lowell never got to see how this project
Speaker 1: turned out, though he wrote books about He wrote a
Speaker 1: book called I Think Like a Memoir of the trans
Speaker 1: Neptunian Planet. But on February eighteenth, nineteen thirty fourteen years
Speaker 1: after Lowell's death, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory named Clyde
Speaker 1: Tombo actually did discover a massive object beyond Neptune with
Speaker 1: the help of the with the help of a loaned
Speaker 1: sum of money that I think they used to buy
Speaker 1: new instruments from personal Lowell's brother who had been the
Speaker 1: head of Harvard, and this object was Pluto. Though Pluto
Speaker 1: was not nearly as massive as the planet that Lowell
Speaker 1: had predicted out there and later actually turned out more
Speaker 1: accurate measurements of the orbit and massive Neptunes, such as
Speaker 1: by the Voyager two mission, basically obviated the need for
Speaker 1: a planet X to explain our observation. So you actually
Speaker 1: looking at Uranus and Neptune, there was no need to
Speaker 1: to to infer a planet X. So it seems there's
Speaker 1: just no planet out there, right, and now we can
Speaker 1: conclude there's no need to explain anything. It is probably
Speaker 1: there's probably nothing. I mean, we have Pluto to be sure,
Speaker 1: and uh and and again, like we discussed earlier, you
Speaker 1: can go back and forth on exactly how we should
Speaker 1: classify Pluto. But here's the thing. There's no question that
Speaker 1: there are other objects in our Solar system beyond Pluto.
Speaker 1: Pluto is not the stop sign for our Solar system. There,
Speaker 1: there's plenty of other objects out there. Yeah. The Solar
Speaker 1: system kind of has a shell of icy debris floating
Speaker 1: around it. Yeah. And so it's not like you you
Speaker 1: would get to Pluto and there would essentially be a
Speaker 1: sign saying like last stop tell Alpha Centauri. Uh No.
Speaker 1: There there's the possibility for other other things, and we
Speaker 1: know for a fact that there are other things. First,
Speaker 1: there's the general category of trans Neptunean objects, such as
Speaker 1: the dwarf planet Eiris Uh between thirty seven point nine
Speaker 1: and ninety seven point six astronomical units away from the Sun.
Speaker 1: Is actually larger than Pluto by mass, the a little
Speaker 1: smaller by volume. Oh and just quickly, an astronomical unit
Speaker 1: is the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Correct, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Earth is one a U from the Sun, ETCETERA
Speaker 1: U is is way up. It's way out there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Other dwarf planets include uh series, um Hamiya, and Makamaki.
Speaker 1: And then consider the said noise. This is where it
Speaker 1: really can to get weird. These are trans Neptunian objects
Speaker 1: with a parahelion. Again, this is a point of least
Speaker 1: distance from the Sun of at least fifty a U.
Speaker 1: So if they're closest to the Sun, they're still beyond
Speaker 1: the Kuiper Belt, which lies thirty to fifty AU from
Speaker 1: the Sun. This is an asteroid belt like scattering of
Speaker 1: leftover debris. And all three known you know, verified said
Speaker 1: noise have really cool names. First of all, there's Sedna,
Speaker 1: discovered in two thousand three, named for an Inuit sea goddess,
Speaker 1: and that's where we get said noise, because when we
Speaker 1: discovered earlier it become a classification. And then there's two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve vp UH one one three a k A.
Speaker 1: Biden discovered in twelve and named for then Vice President
Speaker 1: of the United States Joe Biden. So wow. And then
Speaker 1: I wonder who is the person who has the most
Speaker 1: onion articles written about them? Who also has an asteroid
Speaker 1: named about not an asteroid an object in space named
Speaker 1: after them? Is it Biden? It might be Biden? And
Speaker 1: then the third one of note here, discovered in twenty
Speaker 1: fifteen is t G three seven. The t G stands
Speaker 1: for the Goblin. The goblin, Yeah, the Cheddar Goblin. No,
Speaker 1: just the goblin. I mean, if it's Cheddar or not,
Speaker 1: it's too far away. It might be monster so Seddon
Speaker 1: is the largest, the Goblin is furthest away, and all
Speaker 1: of them have really weird orbits. So their distance from
Speaker 1: the center of things from our son varies greatly. And
Speaker 1: if you look at a chart of their of their orbits,
Speaker 1: I really get the sense of imagine, imagine a typical
Speaker 1: orbit that has been stretched out like a rubber band. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so pretty much all the planets I think have have
Speaker 1: elliptical orbits. They're not perfectly circular, but the inner planets
Speaker 1: their orbits are pretty close to circular. You know, there're
Speaker 1: only a few percent off from being circular, but these
Speaker 1: orbits are just massively off from being circular. They are
Speaker 1: super stretched out ovals. And one of the weird things
Speaker 1: I noticed in at least one of the pictures you've
Speaker 1: got here early on, Robert, is that they almost kind
Speaker 1: of like look like they're there. Their parahaliens are kind
Speaker 1: of aligned almost in the same direction. I wonder why
Speaker 1: that might be. Will come back to Yeah, we'll come
Speaker 1: back because that's that's definitely leads to a few different
Speaker 1: mysteries here. Uh. In additional to having just weird orbits, again,
Speaker 1: they are so far away from from the Sun um
Speaker 1: certainly when you look at their their extremes, but even
Speaker 1: at their parahaliens are pretty extreme. The Goblin, for instance,
Speaker 1: has an estimated orbital period what we can think of
Speaker 1: as a year of thirty two thousand, one hundred and
Speaker 1: seventeen point twenty nine Earth years. That's how long it
Speaker 1: takes for for the Goblin to go around the Sun.
Speaker 1: And to put that in context, a year on Pluto
Speaker 1: is two forty eight Earth years. That's how long it
Speaker 1: takes Pluto to go around the Sun. And this thing
Speaker 1: is that much further away. The goblins distance from the
Speaker 1: Sun ranges from sixty five point one AU to one thousand,
Speaker 1: nine hundred and fifty five AU. Wow, that is crazy
Speaker 1: far away. Yeah, and their additional sadnoid candidates and suspected
Speaker 1: to be many more. We're talking eighty to ninety of
Speaker 1: these critters, and they're distant and weird orbits can't be
Speaker 1: fully explained by the influences of known Solar System objects either.
Speaker 1: So for starters, they're too far from the Sun to
Speaker 1: be influenced by the gas giants, and they're too close
Speaker 1: to the Sun to be influenced by other distant stars.
Speaker 1: So something else is influence and seeing them. But what so,
Speaker 1: there are a few reasonable candidates to consider here. Uh.
Speaker 1: The big one, the main one that we're most interested
Speaker 1: here with is uh that there might be an undiscovered
Speaker 1: giant planet comparable to Uranus or Neptune still orbiting our
Speaker 1: Sun somewhere out there in the dark. So there could
Speaker 1: maybe be a planet X after all exactly. Another idea
Speaker 1: is that a lost giant planet was ejected from our
Speaker 1: Solar system a long time ago, disrupting orbits on its
Speaker 1: way out of our Solar system. So that would that
Speaker 1: would explain why they all seem sort of skewed in
Speaker 1: the same direction, because some like a massive planetary object
Speaker 1: just came ripping through, pulling everybody out of place. And
Speaker 1: then a final of reasonable theory is that back in
Speaker 1: the stellar nursery days of our Solar system, the Sun's
Speaker 1: fellow proto suns nudged everything out of whack okay, so
Speaker 1: it could be sort of a relic of something that
Speaker 1: happened in the past, kind of like the planet being
Speaker 1: a jected or something moving by. So if I can
Speaker 1: come back to Pluto for a second, I hope that
Speaker 1: for one thing, the idea of the said nooids makes
Speaker 1: everyone feel better about losing or potentially losing pet Pluto
Speaker 1: is a full fledged planet, because ultimately, wouldn't you rather
Speaker 1: just drop Pluto from the list as opposed to just
Speaker 1: adding all these other additional things like no, you don't
Speaker 1: actually want to memorize a bunch of saidnoids. Um. So, also,
Speaker 1: you didn't lose Pluto. Pluto is still there. It's still
Speaker 1: it's still a dwarf planet. You can still include it
Speaker 1: on the list. Like people get way, people get people
Speaker 1: like to get bit out of shape over this when
Speaker 1: there's really nothing to get bent out of shape over.
Speaker 1: There's a reason Pluto is not considered a planet. It's
Speaker 1: in order to make it consistent with the definition of
Speaker 1: a planet that we use for all the other planets.
Speaker 1: And that means that planets have to dominate their orbital area.
Speaker 1: They have to gravitationally dominate their orbital area, and Pluto
Speaker 1: does not. Right, And if you just decide Nope, we're
Speaker 1: gonna count Pluto, then you you have to be open
Speaker 1: to letting other things join the list as well. There
Speaker 1: is dwarf planets and whatnot. So trust this is this
Speaker 1: is the best way, is the best approach forward. Um,
Speaker 1: But again this comes back to the question. All right,
Speaker 1: if there is let's let's assume that first theory is correct.
Speaker 1: If there is a giant planet out there in our
Speaker 1: Solar system. Uh, and it's it's it's monkeying with the
Speaker 1: orbits of these said noids. Then why don't we know
Speaker 1: about it for sure? Why? And did all these you know,
Speaker 1: the continual classification of exo planets, things as far away
Speaker 1: as Sweeps eleven, which is twenty seven thousand, seven D
Speaker 1: and ten light years away. Why would we miss something
Speaker 1: so relatively close to home. All Right, we're gonna take
Speaker 1: a quick break, and when we come right back, we
Speaker 1: will explore more about the possibility of planet nine a
Speaker 1: K a planet x a K a planet ten. But
Speaker 1: actually it's planet nine a K a planet d M X.
Speaker 1: All Right, we're back, Robert. Wasn't there an X themed
Speaker 1: wrestler or is he not really X themed? I'm thinking
Speaker 1: of Uh he had an X in his name? Well
Speaker 1: they was there was an X pox wrestling? Yes? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Sean Waltman, Yeah he's still around. I believe there was
Speaker 1: a luchador Doctor X because you know, the X X
Speaker 1: looks so good on a mask. You've got to you've
Speaker 1: got to roll that out eventually. It's the coolest letter,
Speaker 1: I guess. So xpox is not like X themed then no,
Speaker 1: not really no, nor does he have any relation to
Speaker 1: Planet X. So we're full on talking about planet X now.
Speaker 1: Though this is confusing because yeah, you mentioned that planet
Speaker 1: x X as the Roman numeral for ten, but this
Speaker 1: wouldn't be the tenth planet. This would be the ninth planet,
Speaker 1: would be the planet after the eighth planet, neptune um,
Speaker 1: so it would really be planet nine. And when actual
Speaker 1: astronomers an astrophysicists these days talk about this planet, they
Speaker 1: don't usually call it planet X. They call it planet nine.
Speaker 1: That's especially uh necessary, I think, because the Internet is
Speaker 1: just overflowing with Planet X conspiracy theories that I don't
Speaker 1: think we need to get into today. But man, I
Speaker 1: I if you just do a I don't know if
Speaker 1: I recommend this there, do a YouTube search for planet X,
Speaker 1: and there is some apocalyptic, bonkers nonsense out there. I
Speaker 1: think it's all about how Planet X is coming to
Speaker 1: get us. Well, you know, yeah, we're, like you said,
Speaker 1: we're not gonna really get into that today. But the
Speaker 1: great thing is that all of the the actual scientific
Speaker 1: ideas concerning a potential planet nine are far more interesting.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah. So, so one of the things that we
Speaker 1: should mention is that crucial for the demotion of Pluto
Speaker 1: was a Caltech researcher named Mike E. Brown, a colleague
Speaker 1: of a another astronomer named Constantine Batigon. And for several
Speaker 1: years now that these astronomers, Constantine Batigan and Mike Brown,
Speaker 1: have been talking about the possibility that they suspect there
Speaker 1: is an object out there beyond Neptune, out there in
Speaker 1: the dark shepherding the trans neptuney and objects we've been
Speaker 1: talking about, so that they are aligned in roughly the
Speaker 1: same direction, and they're aligned across multiple axes, by the way,
Speaker 1: So that's kind of interesting. Like if you look at
Speaker 1: all of their orbits from the north pole looking down,
Speaker 1: they're all lined up in this one weird direction, as
Speaker 1: if something's pulling them all in the same place. Who
Speaker 1: a giant blind shepherd in the darkness? Yes? What was
Speaker 1: the name of the Cyclops in the Odyssey? And does
Speaker 1: he have an astronomical body named after him? Probably so,
Speaker 1: but he's probably already taken Polyphemus I don't know it's
Speaker 1: Polyphemus up for grabs. I don't know of anything called Polyphemus. Okay,
Speaker 1: I just did a Google search and the only thing
Speaker 1: that came up was that somebody wanted to name a
Speaker 1: moon of Neptune Polyphemus. But I don't think they did.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, well maybe we can keep that one
Speaker 1: clear just in case, because I think that would be
Speaker 1: that would be a really awesome name for one of
Speaker 1: these planets, if I can have any say so. So,
Speaker 1: when the aliens from that planet contact us and they
Speaker 1: say help, someone's attacking me, and we radio back and
Speaker 1: say who's attacking me? And they say, no, one is
Speaker 1: attacking me, you can know they've been tricked by a
Speaker 1: cosmic Odysseus told them his name was no One say so,
Speaker 1: Disseas is the worst, such a trickster. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: I have derailed us a little bit here. Let's get
Speaker 1: back to this idea of planet nine the blind, a
Speaker 1: potential blind shepherd of the of these distant objects. All right, yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll bring it back. So one thing I should mention
Speaker 1: is that I actually listened to an interesting interview with
Speaker 1: the Caltech astronomer and Professor of planetary science is Constantine
Speaker 1: Batiguan and Uh and and so this this shed some
Speaker 1: light on what he was thinking. Essentially, Uh, Constantine Batiguan,
Speaker 1: and Uh and Mikey Brown have been doing research to
Speaker 1: show there is possible there is a way of explaining
Speaker 1: some of the strange coincidences that we see in the
Speaker 1: structure of the outer Solar System, in the structure of
Speaker 1: these like saidnoids, hyper belt objects, these objects that are
Speaker 1: way out there. Then when we track their orbits, they
Speaker 1: seem to line up in this bizarre way where they're
Speaker 1: all sort of pointing in the same direction at one
Speaker 1: end at their parahelion, they're all like it's like they're
Speaker 1: they're just lining up. And then also a strange thing
Speaker 1: is that they're not only lining up in that dimension,
Speaker 1: but if you like look directly at the solar plane
Speaker 1: instead of down on it, they're all sort of elevated.
Speaker 1: They're tipped up across the solar plane in a fairly
Speaker 1: consistent or at least close to consistent way. And that's
Speaker 1: really odd, Like Batiguan talks about how that really wouldn't
Speaker 1: be something you'd expect to see just by chance. So
Speaker 1: the idea here is that what if something has pushed
Speaker 1: them there. It's like, why are all the sheep standing
Speaker 1: in this area? Well, maybe it's because the the the
Speaker 1: shepherd dog or the wolf is standing over here, right,
Speaker 1: And so the problem is we don't know exactly where
Speaker 1: to look for this object if it is out there.
Speaker 1: So lavery A could say, hey, you know, I think
Speaker 1: I know where Neptune is. I'm going to give you
Speaker 1: within one degree of of where to look, and of
Speaker 1: course when they look forward, they found it with the telescope.
Speaker 1: You can't quite do the same thing with this planet
Speaker 1: nine because even the people who think it exists, they're
Speaker 1: inferring it from its influence on objects who have orbital
Speaker 1: periods of like ten thousand years or something, so it
Speaker 1: takes them so long to go around. So we are
Speaker 1: sort of lacking in data to to get the full
Speaker 1: arc to pinpoint exactly where the planet would be to
Speaker 1: cause what we see. But constantin Batiguan thinks that right now,
Speaker 1: the best place to look for this planet is probably
Speaker 1: at an average distance of somewhere around five hundred astronomical units.
Speaker 1: So yeah, five hundred times the distance between the Earth
Speaker 1: and the Sun and so for comparison, you know, Earth
Speaker 1: is one Mars is one point five a U, Jupiter
Speaker 1: is five point to Neptune is about thirty a U.
Speaker 1: So that's starting to get way out there. But the
Speaker 1: distance from Neptune to the ninth planet would be gigantic.
Speaker 1: It would be many times the distance from the Sun
Speaker 1: to Neptune. So it's way way out there in the dark.
Speaker 1: The best estimates say that it would probably have a
Speaker 1: roughly ten thousand year orbit, and also it would probably
Speaker 1: have a very elliptical orbit compared to the inner planets.
Speaker 1: Like the inter planets are elliptical, but they're pretty close
Speaker 1: to circular. This planet would be more like these these
Speaker 1: objects we've been talking about, these Kuiper Belt objects and
Speaker 1: setenoids that have these long ovals, but not quite as
Speaker 1: long as the setonoid, no longer, but not quite that long.
Speaker 1: So we've got good reasons to think that there's something
Speaker 1: out there with mass. There. There could be another large
Speaker 1: planet out there with mass that's causing these objects that
Speaker 1: we can see to behave in the way they do.
Speaker 1: But we don't know much about this object itself, right
Speaker 1: because all we have to go on is what it's
Speaker 1: mass would have to be and roughly what its orbit
Speaker 1: is to cause the effects we're seeing. We can't We
Speaker 1: haven't been able to look at it. We don't know
Speaker 1: exactly for sure what it would be made of, exactly
Speaker 1: how big it would be. Um the the estimates I've
Speaker 1: seen tend to think that it's going to be bigger
Speaker 1: than Earth, but it would be sort of like a
Speaker 1: an icy super Earth, with a with an atmosphere kind
Speaker 1: of like the gas giants and an upper atmosphere like
Speaker 1: Neptune or something, but with an icy core, maybe roughly
Speaker 1: five Earth mat us is. I've also seen an older
Speaker 1: estimate that was more like roughly ten Earth masses. I
Speaker 1: don't know if it's been if those represent different points
Speaker 1: of view, or if it's been scaled down since then,
Speaker 1: but the more recent one I saw from Batigan was
Speaker 1: five Earth masses. But as for the makeup, like the
Speaker 1: icy core with the atmosphere on the outside, that's just
Speaker 1: something we have to guess. We don't know for sure.
Speaker 1: And so with an object with an orbit this long
Speaker 1: way out there in the dark, obviously it probably would
Speaker 1: be possible for us to see it with our telescopes
Speaker 1: if we know where to look and what to look for.
Speaker 1: But it's not going to be something that just shows
Speaker 1: up in an obvious way. It's gonna take like difficult
Speaker 1: analysis of uh doing, you know, comparing photos of the
Speaker 1: night sky with deep detail across different nights to see
Speaker 1: what moves. And part of the problem is there's a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff out there, a lot of things moved,
Speaker 1: and so like, if you take a super high res
Speaker 1: photograph with great magnification of a patch of the sky
Speaker 1: across a few different nights and then see what moves there,
Speaker 1: you might get tons of hits, maybe thousands of hits,
Speaker 1: And then you've got to look at those and say, Okay,
Speaker 1: is this a new is this an Kuiper Belt object
Speaker 1: we know about? Is this a Main Belt asteroid we
Speaker 1: know about? Is this a new Kuiper Belt or Main
Speaker 1: Belt object that we did that we didn't know about,
Speaker 1: or is this maybe a planet that we should be
Speaker 1: looking for, right, Because I mean it's you see this
Speaker 1: happen from time to time where it's still think that
Speaker 1: new objects has been discovered, but it's actually an object
Speaker 1: that has already been charted. So there's duplication that can
Speaker 1: take place. Yeah, and so one of the things that
Speaker 1: we can do to help figure out where we should
Speaker 1: look is to rule out certain areas of the sky.
Speaker 1: And that's something that Batigan has been talking about doing.
Speaker 1: Is you can say, Okay, there's no point in looking
Speaker 1: for the planet here. No one wouldn't be here. There's
Speaker 1: no point looking for it here. We know it wouldn't
Speaker 1: be here. And then also you can use other data
Speaker 1: to in for places where it probably shouldn't be. For example,
Speaker 1: we know that it's uh, probably not in in a
Speaker 1: certain sector because if it were, it may it probably
Speaker 1: would have affected the movements in a detectable way of
Speaker 1: the Cassini spacecraft when Cassini was in orbit around Saturn.
Speaker 1: So that tells us probably it's not really close to
Speaker 1: its parahelion right now, right, it's not close enough to
Speaker 1: be having an effect on the inter planet's It's probably
Speaker 1: somewhere a little bit further out if it exists. So
Speaker 1: to come back to my my beach house, uh okay
Speaker 1: metaphor from earlier, Uh, it's like you. They're the rooms
Speaker 1: that you can see and you can you can look
Speaker 1: to them from where you are and see there is
Speaker 1: no mystery stranger in that room. There are rooms where
Speaker 1: you would be able to detect maybe there's a you
Speaker 1: know there, you're right beneath it, and you would be
Speaker 1: able to hear them surely if they were creaking around
Speaker 1: up there. But there are other rooms that you just
Speaker 1: you don't know at this point. Yeah, and so the
Speaker 1: question of whether there is actually a planet nine out there,
Speaker 1: it does remain unsolved, though. Constantine Batiguan seems very confident.
Speaker 1: And the interview I listened to, you know, the host
Speaker 1: asked him, how confident are you that this thing is
Speaker 1: out there? And he's like, well, I used to say
Speaker 1: I was six trillion percent confident um, But then he said, actually,
Speaker 1: you can calculate a good confidence interval by saying, what's
Speaker 1: the probability as far as we know that all of
Speaker 1: these Kuiper Belt objects would have their orbits line up
Speaker 1: the same way like this by chance without some big
Speaker 1: massive object out there to shepherd them into these orbits.
Speaker 1: And according to him, the chance of this happening by
Speaker 1: coincidence is zero point two percent. So by subtraction, he
Speaker 1: says he's nine eight percent confident that planet nine exists.
Speaker 1: So that's very confident. I'm sure plenty of other astronomers
Speaker 1: wouldn't be that level of confident. But it's inspiring to
Speaker 1: even think about the possibility that there's this, this, this
Speaker 1: additional planet out there in our own Solar System and
Speaker 1: our own relatively local neck of the cosmic woods, and
Speaker 1: we just merely suspect that it's there, that it's out
Speaker 1: there roaming up through the darkness. Well, I mean, this
Speaker 1: is a this is a great sort of science hunt
Speaker 1: game to play, right. Uh, you know, you you have
Speaker 1: to use the laws of physics as you know them
Speaker 1: and try to figure out what's another way we could
Speaker 1: get data that nobody's thought of before. And so like
Speaker 1: the idea of using the perturbations of the movement of
Speaker 1: a spacecraft. That's that's a smart way to look for
Speaker 1: new data that might not have appeared to you otherwise. Um,
Speaker 1: and and so this is really cool, But at the
Speaker 1: same time, I'm sure really frustrating, especially if you're like
Speaker 1: pretty confident that you think, yeah, we really know, it's
Speaker 1: probably got to be out there, because nobody has discovered
Speaker 1: a planet in the Solar System arguably since either Clyde
Speaker 1: Tombo in the nineteen thirties or since Lavery A and uh,
Speaker 1: and uh McAdams or I think McAdams was the other
Speaker 1: guy who discovered it in the eighteen forties. I mean
Speaker 1: that's been a long time. Yeah, totally, because again we've
Speaker 1: all grown up with this map of the Solar System
Speaker 1: in our our heads. And uh, and you kind of you,
Speaker 1: I don't, I don't remember being taught. Hey, this is
Speaker 1: all subject to change, but but clearly it is. Well,
Speaker 1: you would think that if there is a planet nine
Speaker 1: out there to be discovered, it's also probably going to
Speaker 1: be the last one we're going to discover, because there's
Speaker 1: there's only a limited range of space where planets could
Speaker 1: actually be without without violating what else we know about space. Right,
Speaker 1: It couldn't be closer than where we're thinking this planet is,
Speaker 1: because otherwise we would interfere with the inner planets and
Speaker 1: we would know about it. It couldn't really be farther
Speaker 1: away than where we're thinking this thing is, or else
Speaker 1: it probably would have been like stripped away by a
Speaker 1: passing star as we move through the galaxy. Right, because
Speaker 1: it still needs to be under the power of our son,
Speaker 1: it within the thrall of our Son to be considered
Speaker 1: part of our Solar System, and that's the whole point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so there's not like opportunities to just discover unlimited more
Speaker 1: planets in the Solar system. Solar system doesn't go on forever.
Speaker 1: Eventually the domain of gravitational dominance of our son ends,
Speaker 1: and other stars become more powerful in their in their
Speaker 1: gravitational influence. So so there's only so much space where
Speaker 1: there could be more planets. And it looks like if
Speaker 1: we discover one more planet out there, that's that's probably
Speaker 1: about it. I don't know, maybe there could be one,
Speaker 1: but it's not like you know that we're gonna find
Speaker 1: ten more planets, and certainly nothing you know, large like that.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's a tantalizing mystery. I love the idea
Speaker 1: that there's still mysteries about our Solar system, not just
Speaker 1: space in general, but local mysteries, mysteries inside the house,
Speaker 1: right right. And of course that's not to gloss over
Speaker 1: the many, you know, unsolved problems related to each individual planet.
Speaker 1: I mean just just every just about every optics in
Speaker 1: our Solar system, there's something about it we're still trying
Speaker 1: to figure out. And uh, and and that's just dealing
Speaker 1: with the problems that we know about that's the unknowns
Speaker 1: that we're aware of. Personally, I'm excited. I hope they
Speaker 1: discover another planet in our lifetime. That would be really cool.
Speaker 1: That would that would be cool. And it seems like
Speaker 1: now there's I don't it's not a lock. I wouldn't.
Speaker 1: I don't know if i'd go to nine percent, but
Speaker 1: it seems like there's pretty good evidence. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: then what will we name it? I like your polyphemous idea,
Speaker 1: the blind Shepherd out there. Yeah, it's a good name. Yeah,
Speaker 1: assuming nothing else has has has snagged it already. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and assuming that it doesn't attempt to space so disseas
Speaker 1: to come along and screw everything up. That's true. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: we're going to close out this episode, you know we
Speaker 1: we didn't even get into any examples from science fiction,
Speaker 1: though I do believe in Doctor Who the Cyberman home
Speaker 1: world of Manda's is both a ninth planet as well
Speaker 1: as a former counter Earth's at once. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: it's too at once. I I could have that wrong.
Speaker 1: So I'd love to hear from from our Who fans
Speaker 1: out there. I know we have some Who listeners out
Speaker 1: there listening to the show. You know, you can set
Speaker 1: it right in this Plus there have to be there
Speaker 1: have to be plenty of other science fiction properties that
Speaker 1: have have utilized this idea of a mysterious ninth or
Speaker 1: tenth planet out there in our solar system. Robert I
Speaker 1: think they're called uvoids to voids, Okay, well who who
Speaker 1: voids right in about it? Uh, and everybody else feel
Speaker 1: free to write in as well. Uh. We're gonna hopefully
Speaker 1: come back with more episodes in this series because there
Speaker 1: are additional phantom planets phantom objects uh that that line
Speaker 1: up under the mission statement of of these episodes. So
Speaker 1: uh look forward to that in the future. And in
Speaker 1: the meantime, if you want to check out old episodes
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Speaker 1: The Decimation Duate f f Fart Part far f