Speaker 1: My welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're bringing you a kind
Speaker 1: of short episode today. But that's because we wanted to
Speaker 1: cover updates to a couple of things we've talked about
Speaker 1: this year. That's right. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
Speaker 1: primarily a show about science, of course, but we also
Speaker 1: discuss history, philosophy, mythology, various other subjects on the show.
Speaker 1: But of course we do so with science as the bedrock,
Speaker 1: and science, as we frequently discussed, is perpetually in a
Speaker 1: state of change. It's that slime mold working its way
Speaker 1: through the maze of reality, and so pretty much nothing
Speaker 1: that we record is guaranteed to be evergreen. As they
Speaker 1: say in the you know, the publishing world. Well sure,
Speaker 1: it's the kind of funny irony is that science is
Speaker 1: probably it's the best tool we have for understanding reality,
Speaker 1: but it's very rarely the final word because it's all,
Speaker 1: you know, We're always getting a better idea. That's it's
Speaker 1: one of the reasons I cringe when people talk about
Speaker 1: starting the podcast back from the beginning from ten years ago.
Speaker 1: I mean part of it is like when I when
Speaker 1: we started out, like we didn't really know what we
Speaker 1: were doing. But then also you know, it's like the
Speaker 1: science changes, like we had there's an older episode on
Speaker 1: the Ender Tols. Uh, and I don't really recommend anyone
Speaker 1: listen to that because there's been so much there's been
Speaker 1: been so many more studies about in the Ender Toll
Speaker 1: since the publication of that episode. I just don't I
Speaker 1: don't trust the science to be uh accurate, to be
Speaker 1: the best version of of our understanding. Well, I hope
Speaker 1: the way we approach things now we we try to
Speaker 1: make episodes at least partially evergreen, baking in the idea
Speaker 1: that you know, results are tentative, that you know, the
Speaker 1: outcome of one study is not the answer forever. You know,
Speaker 1: things in the future could upend it. Oh, absolutely, And
Speaker 1: I do think we we do that. But uh, but yeah,
Speaker 1: today's episode is going to be about doing a little
Speaker 1: upkeep on a couple of well, one is a recent
Speaker 1: episode or a pair of episodes from this year. Another
Speaker 1: is an older episode from seventeen that we also recently
Speaker 1: re ran back in October. And of course the main
Speaker 1: thing too is that both of these are exciting topics
Speaker 1: where new findings UH can kind of change the way
Speaker 1: we understand the cosmos or understand the history of humanity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I guess also both of these UH findings have
Speaker 1: to do with primacy, right, So so yeah, let's go
Speaker 1: straight into the first one. And this concerns the episode
Speaker 1: that we recorded I guess it was a couple of
Speaker 1: years ago, and then re ran about the idea of
Speaker 1: the first Monster. Yeah, back in ten we recorded an
Speaker 1: episode of Stuff to Play your Mind titled the First Monster. Again,
Speaker 1: we reran it and in this most recent October. But
Speaker 1: in the episode we discussed UH the Lionman or the
Speaker 1: Loan Ninch, which was this this figure that resembled UH
Speaker 1: was a human with a lion's head, a hybrid, a
Speaker 1: hybrid being combining animal and human likeness into a single like. Now,
Speaker 1: this was this particular artifact. The Lowan Mench was discovered
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty nine at a stone age cave site
Speaker 1: known as Stottlehole or Stable Cave at Hollenstein near Vogelherd
Speaker 1: in Germany. But it would be another thirty years before
Speaker 1: anyone got a chance to examine these broken pieces of
Speaker 1: ivory due to the World Wars. But eventually, thirty years later,
Speaker 1: that's when German archaeologist Yoheim Hahn discovered that these two
Speaker 1: hundred fragments came together to form a thirty one centimeter
Speaker 1: or just over a foot long figure carbon fourteen dated
Speaker 1: to put two between thirty five and forty thousand years old.
Speaker 1: It had the body of a man in the head
Speaker 1: of a lion. In two thousand three, another lionman was
Speaker 1: discovered in southwestern Germany. This one was carbon dated to
Speaker 1: around the same time period and by by some estimates.
Speaker 1: You know, first of all, these are amazing just for
Speaker 1: no other reason. They're just they're just fascinating figures that
Speaker 1: they give us some insight in to what ancient people
Speaker 1: were doing, what they were making. But they also seemed
Speaker 1: to be the oldest examples of figurative art. You know,
Speaker 1: we've seen the Venus of Whole Fells take the title before.
Speaker 1: I think it's from thirty five thousand to forty thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, discovered in two thousand eight and two thousand sixteen.
Speaker 1: But you know, while the venus is the depiction of
Speaker 1: the feminine form of the loan Minch is a human
Speaker 1: fused with the beast. Yeah, and this is what we
Speaker 1: were drawing attention to in the episode, the idea that
Speaker 1: this is the earliest example that we knew about of
Speaker 1: fantasy art. It is an imagined being. Yeah, as stated
Speaker 1: by Clive Gamble, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, UK,
Speaker 1: as quoted in Nature quote, they depict an animal world
Speaker 1: in a semi realistic way. It shows early man moving
Speaker 1: from his immediate world to an imaginative world. So that's
Speaker 1: just a brief breakdown of the Loan minch. Uh. Certainly
Speaker 1: go back and listen to that episode that we did
Speaker 1: if you want more on that topic. But here's the
Speaker 1: cool thing. And imagine a number of you have have
Speaker 1: caught this news already because it was covered a number
Speaker 1: of places that I even saw it featured on Stephen
Speaker 1: Colbert's show. But in December of twenty nineteen, a new
Speaker 1: discovery was made and it might just blow the Lionman
Speaker 1: and the Venus out of the water. This is so cool. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this story takes us to a different corner of
Speaker 1: the world. It takes us to Sulawesi, Indonesia one of
Speaker 1: the four Greater Sunda Islands, and it's actually the world's
Speaker 1: eleventh largest island. I read so we've known about applies
Speaker 1: to scene settlements in the area for quite some time,
Speaker 1: and early Homo sapiens are known to have reached UH
Speaker 1: this area between sixty thousand and forty five thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: Previous studies from some of the same archaeologists involved in
Speaker 1: in this particular find, which is the the arch team
Speaker 1: out of Australia UH, they've revealed prehistoric art and ornaments
Speaker 1: dating back thirty thousand to twenty two thousand years ago
Speaker 1: in this area and Homo sapiens apparently made it here
Speaker 1: again some time prior to fifty thousand years ago. So
Speaker 1: here's how this new finding came about. In a spelunker
Speaker 1: named Hamrula climbed into a previously uncharted chamber in a
Speaker 1: Suluesti cave system known as Marrow's pun Cap. It's a
Speaker 1: limestone cave system. And while he was there, performing a
Speaker 1: government survey of the case. And if you're wondering, was
Speaker 1: Hamrula his first name or his last name? Apparently a
Speaker 1: lot of people in Indonesia just go by one name,
Speaker 1: just just just the one name. Anyway, he gets he
Speaker 1: crawls through a narrow space into this new chamber and
Speaker 1: he discovers cave paintings. And the cave paintings were subsequently
Speaker 1: examined and written about by Aubert at All in Earliest
Speaker 1: Hunting Scene in Prehistoric Art, published December twenty nineteen in Nature.
Speaker 1: And again I believe this is the same arch team
Speaker 1: out of Australia that was involved in some previous studies
Speaker 1: in the area. So as the title implies, uh, they
Speaker 1: used some dating technology uranium series dating on cave popcorn
Speaker 1: or mineral deposits that they're hanging over some of the
Speaker 1: motifs in the scene, and they were able to date
Speaker 1: this hunting scene back to at least forty three thousand,
Speaker 1: nine hundred years ago, So that is twenty thousand years
Speaker 1: older than the hunting scene on the walls of Francis
Speaker 1: Lasco Caves, and coming back to the Low and Minch,
Speaker 1: that's also four thousand years before the lion Man. And
Speaker 1: I realized we're talking about such it's it's kind of
Speaker 1: ironic that we're talking about such big periods of time,
Speaker 1: such large portions of human history. That you can also
Speaker 1: make four thousand years not seem like a lot, which
Speaker 1: is which is bizarre. But obviously four thousand years is
Speaker 1: a lot of time and to to set the record
Speaker 1: back four thousand years is amazing. So uh, here's an
Speaker 1: important caveat though there's more work to do. Is they
Speaker 1: need to date not just the work overall, you know,
Speaker 1: looking at the cave popcorn, but each figure individually before
Speaker 1: we can be certain in all of this, because there's
Speaker 1: ultimately the possibility that different portions of it have been
Speaker 1: added at different times. Yes, and now the main archaeologists
Speaker 1: were quoted saying they don't think that's the case, but yeah,
Speaker 1: we certainly should date the different parts. I think the
Speaker 1: parts that had been that have been dated so far
Speaker 1: are just the regular animals, but the more interesting parts
Speaker 1: let's get into that. So, yes, the overall it depicts
Speaker 1: what seemed to be individuals using spears against prey animals
Speaker 1: in a hunt. And this would be on its own,
Speaker 1: would be an amazing find, right it would, as it
Speaker 1: would predate any hunting scene we've seen before. But on
Speaker 1: top of this, some of the hunters appear to be
Speaker 1: um what the the researchers referred to as theory in
Speaker 1: thropes or animal human hybrids, much like the Loan niche
Speaker 1: as some of the humans appear to have tails or snouts, right,
Speaker 1: So if this is correct, if the uh now now
Speaker 1: again the parts that have been dated already were overlapping,
Speaker 1: just the animals that were being hunted, which were these
Speaker 1: like buffalo type creatures and HIGs, yeah, wild pigs, and
Speaker 1: then a type of buffalo called an a noah which
Speaker 1: is also known as a midget buffalo, so like a
Speaker 1: water buffalo except smaller. Okay, But and so I think
Speaker 1: they haven't dated the other figures like the theory and
Speaker 1: thropes or the human animal hybrids yet, but it looks
Speaker 1: like they're probably from the same period. We're just not
Speaker 1: certain about that. But if so, this would this would
Speaker 1: probably predate the Loan mention, making this the earliest evidence
Speaker 1: we have of fantastical thinking, of like magic thinking among humans,
Speaker 1: showing human animal hybrids like a human hunting a buffalo
Speaker 1: with a bird's beak. Very cool. Yeah, and it's it's
Speaker 1: when we get into it in that that episode about
Speaker 1: the first Monster, about what this means, right, like, what
Speaker 1: what ultimately does it mean to have in your mind,
Speaker 1: a human with a beast's head. You know, on one hand,
Speaker 1: it is imagining something that does not exist in the
Speaker 1: real world, and but then on a on a deeper level,
Speaker 1: it is taking what this means? What does a bird mean?
Speaker 1: What are the ideas that that just the mere symbol
Speaker 1: of a bird summons, and then our idea too, of
Speaker 1: a human being. What happens when these, uh, this mix
Speaker 1: of symbols and meanings collide. What new ideas are born
Speaker 1: out of that collision? Absolutely so, it basically shows that
Speaker 1: that people from this time period of you know, four
Speaker 1: thousand years earlier than we thought, may have been dealing
Speaker 1: with this kind of complex thinking, mashing up of symbols,
Speaker 1: ideas and concepts, concepts even taking on a humanoid form.
Speaker 1: Becky Ferreira wrote an excellent piece on this for The
Speaker 1: New York Times, and you know she she points out
Speaker 1: in this that the researchers believed too, that these may
Speaker 1: have been animal spirit helpers, something that you would commonly
Speaker 1: find a shamanistic beliefs. Uh So, yeah, there's a possibility
Speaker 1: that we're dealing with, you know, animism and shamanism here, right.
Speaker 1: It looks like it could be again This is just interpretation,
Speaker 1: but it looks like it could be a scene depicting
Speaker 1: maybe a game beam drive, where so hunters are shown
Speaker 1: driving prey animals into an ambush by other hunters, but
Speaker 1: that some of the hunters appear to be human others
Speaker 1: appear to be human animal hybrids, So that means they
Speaker 1: could be depicting yeah, like these these otherworldly spirit helpers
Speaker 1: that come into aid the humans in the hunt, right Like. Well,
Speaker 1: even if they are depictions of humans dressed up as
Speaker 1: animals or partial animals, they would have engaged in an
Speaker 1: actual like literal right like, even that would reveal the idea.
Speaker 1: This is kind of complex thinking as possible totally now.
Speaker 1: The researchers also note that these paintings are are quite
Speaker 1: fragile and the art is fading quote at an alarming
Speaker 1: rate and for unknown reasons. So it's gonna be interesting
Speaker 1: to see how this develops uh further, because it does
Speaker 1: seem like there's a you know, there's there's a half
Speaker 1: life in play here and uh and it's kind of
Speaker 1: a question how much can we figure out about them
Speaker 1: before the work is decreated? Yeah, And it also makes
Speaker 1: you wonder about how much other wonderful art from the
Speaker 1: prehistoric world is just already lost and we'll never see it. Tragic.
Speaker 1: But on the optimistic side, how many how many more
Speaker 1: caverns like this are there out in the world that
Speaker 1: just haven't haven't been breached or haven't been breached in
Speaker 1: a terribly long time. Yeah, that's really exciting. All right,
Speaker 1: I think we should take a quick break, but we'll
Speaker 1: be right back with another update. Thank thank Alright, we're back. Uh.
Speaker 1: So this update follows up on our previous podcasts about
Speaker 1: the first interstellar visitor, the first object from another star
Speaker 1: outside our Solar System, which is known as Umuamua uh
Speaker 1: and so a brief refresher on Umuma before we get
Speaker 1: into the updates on it. So, on October nineteen, the
Speaker 1: Pan Stars one telescope in Hawaii first registered a small,
Speaker 1: previously uncataloged object zooming through the Solar System. They got
Speaker 1: other observatories to to confirm it, and due to the
Speaker 1: trajectory of the object, it was clear that this thing
Speaker 1: was not orbiting the Sun like everything else we see
Speaker 1: in the Solar System is. Instead, it was sling shotting
Speaker 1: around the Sun, coming in from outside the Sun's gravitational influence,
Speaker 1: and it seemed like it was probably a rocky object
Speaker 1: that somehow got ejected from another star system in the galaxy.
Speaker 1: And there were a lot of reasons that this thing
Speaker 1: was very interesting. So I'll just run through a few, uh,
Speaker 1: a few of its attributes real quick. Uh. There was
Speaker 1: its speed when it made its nearest approach to the
Speaker 1: Sun around September nine, it was going a hundred and
Speaker 1: ninety six thousand miles per hour, or about eighty seven
Speaker 1: point three kilometers per second. And by the time we
Speaker 1: we had this information, Mumua was already going. It was
Speaker 1: like going, you know, it was already headed back out
Speaker 1: of the Solar System at like seventy thousand miles per hour,
Speaker 1: already past the orbit of Jupiter. In another four years,
Speaker 1: it's going to be past the orbit of Neptune. Is
Speaker 1: just gonna be gone. It's just going off into interstellar space.
Speaker 1: The fly by had been completed and it had already
Speaker 1: passed its nearest point by the time we saw it.
Speaker 1: Um So the trajectory was very weird. It it entered
Speaker 1: the plane of the Solar System, the ecliptic plane, at
Speaker 1: an inclination of like a hundred and twenty three degrees,
Speaker 1: so sort of coming straight down from above or up
Speaker 1: from below, however you want to think about. It passed
Speaker 1: inside the orbit of mercury, slingshot around the Sun and
Speaker 1: went back out. So you know, we are ships passing
Speaker 1: in the night. We are never going to see a
Speaker 1: Mumu again. Now. One of the things that really captured
Speaker 1: people's attention about it was its strange shape. Mum is
Speaker 1: so small and so far away that it appears as
Speaker 1: a point like object on our telescopes, and that means
Speaker 1: we can't directly see any details about the surface or
Speaker 1: the shape of the object. But of course there are
Speaker 1: ways of analyzing it to draw some conclusions about its
Speaker 1: shape and surface features. Like we can study the variations
Speaker 1: and the flickering brightness of the object to create what's
Speaker 1: known as a light curve analysis. Basically, this analyzes pas
Speaker 1: turns of light intensity from this point like object in
Speaker 1: order to draw conclusions about its shape and its spin
Speaker 1: and stuff. And when we did that, what what scientists
Speaker 1: found is that it appears to have something like a
Speaker 1: ten to one length to width and depth ratio. So
Speaker 1: you can imagine a cylindrical or tube shaped object like
Speaker 1: ten times longer than it is wide um and according
Speaker 1: to uh Danassa, it could be up to about a
Speaker 1: quarter mile long, maybe like fours and only about forty
Speaker 1: meters wide. Also, its motion is not spinning the way
Speaker 1: you might expect it to be, but it's tumbling, so
Speaker 1: it's not rotating around a principal axis. It's got a
Speaker 1: chaotic tumbling pattern, tumbling once every like seven and a
Speaker 1: half hours or so, so it's like a tumbling cigar. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they often characterized as a scar uh. And it looks
Speaker 1: like it's surface may have a red coloration, which would
Speaker 1: be consistent with objects in our solar system, like asteroids
Speaker 1: that have been bombarded with cosmic rays a lot. So
Speaker 1: that's not all that surprising. But the question is where
Speaker 1: did it come from? We don't know for sure. It
Speaker 1: has this approach trajectory that makes it look like it's
Speaker 1: roughly coming from the star Vega in the constellation of Lira,
Speaker 1: but of course, like Vega was not there when it
Speaker 1: would have been coming from that region, so you'd have
Speaker 1: to sort of play back the movie of of stars
Speaker 1: moving around in the galaxy in order to figure out
Speaker 1: where it actually came from. So we haven't figured that
Speaker 1: out yet, and then we did a follow up episode.
Speaker 1: Our first episode on Omumu was in December of seventeen,
Speaker 1: and we had an episode after that responding mainly to
Speaker 1: a paper by the Harvard physicist Aviy Loeb and a
Speaker 1: co author named schmool by Aali noting this weird speed
Speaker 1: boost gained by the object as it left the solar system.
Speaker 1: It seemed to be speeding up as it was speeding away,
Speaker 1: and uh Loeb and and Bali argued that this boost
Speaker 1: and speed was consistent with the object being a light
Speaker 1: sale or a solar sale, which would imply in artificial origin.
Speaker 1: But I think our conclusion was, well, you know, you
Speaker 1: can't totally rule it out, but there's no really strong
Speaker 1: evidence yet that it's aliens. This is an interesting paper,
Speaker 1: but it did receive some criticism from people who said,
Speaker 1: you know, they're jumping to conclusions, right, and it would
Speaker 1: be an outstanding statement to say its aliens, and we
Speaker 1: really need outstanding evidence for that to be the statement
Speaker 1: we make totally. And if it were like an alien probe,
Speaker 1: for one thing, we'd probably expect it to be emitting
Speaker 1: some kind of radio signal, right, we we had some
Speaker 1: radio observatories try to listen to it and found nothing.
Speaker 1: There no pattern radio signals at all. So there's no
Speaker 1: indication that it was aliens really, except for this interesting
Speaker 1: thing about its speeding up as it moved away, um,
Speaker 1: which could have also been due to radiation pressure if
Speaker 1: it had certain other attributes. But they were saying it
Speaker 1: didn't have the attributes that would make it you know
Speaker 1: the kind of objects that would have been powered away
Speaker 1: by the solar radiation. Now, I remember us talking about
Speaker 1: the post ability that it was an out of control
Speaker 1: dead ship, that that if there was any kind of
Speaker 1: life force around on boarded or even though like a
Speaker 1: will or a purpose, that it had all been um,
Speaker 1: you know, eradicated a long time ago. Essentially the you know,
Speaker 1: the ship from alien tumbling through the through the galaxy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which should be great. But even the ship an alien
Speaker 1: was emitting a distress which we would have detected. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, who knows. I I like to stay in
Speaker 1: the in the realm of can't totally rule it out,
Speaker 1: but won't go there right and again we'll also never
Speaker 1: know because it's gone. Alright. On that note, we're going
Speaker 1: to take a quick break, but we'll be right back
Speaker 1: with the update. Than all right, we're back. So one
Speaker 1: of the weirdest things about Mumua was its apparent shape.
Speaker 1: This it was this extremely elongated cigar shape that was
Speaker 1: inferred from this light curve analysis. Obviously that figured into
Speaker 1: a lot of the speculation about alien probes and so forth. Right.
Speaker 1: You know, you see a cigar shaped object in space.
Speaker 1: That's not normal. Most objects are not shaped that way.
Speaker 1: So people wanted to say, oh, yeah, that's got to
Speaker 1: be some kind of probe. But are we sure that
Speaker 1: that's what we're looking at? Are we sure that it
Speaker 1: is this cigar shaped rocky object like we've been assuming.
Speaker 1: I came across some interesting reports about a paper that
Speaker 1: offered a different way of interpreting the data about the geometry,
Speaker 1: and so this is a more recent development that's from
Speaker 1: a scientist. I'm sorry, I'm going to do my best
Speaker 1: to pronounce. His name is Dr Zdnnick Secondina, and Secondina
Speaker 1: is a check American astronomer who has worked with NASA
Speaker 1: JPL for decades. A lot of his research has focused
Speaker 1: on space dust, meteors, and comments. He's actually done research
Speaker 1: on the Tunguska event, as well as Haley's comment and
Speaker 1: uh and uh the giant impact that happened on Jupiter
Speaker 1: in the nineteen nineties the shoemaker Levy comment. So what
Speaker 1: was his take? Well, remember, humans never saw Umuma when
Speaker 1: it was on its approach right and was coming into
Speaker 1: its parahelion with the Sun. Our telescopes never picked it
Speaker 1: up until it had already slingshotted around the Sun and
Speaker 1: was on its exit trajectory to leave the Solar System. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, astrophysicists can still infer its total trajectory based
Speaker 1: on the small sliver of it that we see. You know,
Speaker 1: you can roughly tell where it came from. But uh.
Speaker 1: Second Eina offers an interesting argument about Muamua's shape and nature.
Speaker 1: He argues that the Muamua we registered with our telescopes
Speaker 1: is not the original object, but rather it is a
Speaker 1: remnant a material cosmic race that was left behind after
Speaker 1: an interstellar commet passed its parahelion and disintegrated in the process.
Speaker 1: So second in This paper was published on the Archive
Speaker 1: preprint server in January of twenty nineteen. As always, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of physics and astrophysics papers show up on
Speaker 1: on archive these days. But just to remind you again,
Speaker 1: that's not a peer reviewed journal. That's just like a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff in in this realm happens in those
Speaker 1: kind of places these days, and it it just gets hashed
Speaker 1: out on the internet. Um So, that's a preprint server,
Speaker 1: not pure viewed. But his analysis does seem to be
Speaker 1: uh interesting and from what I can tell, pretty sound
Speaker 1: like to read his words, he believes the evidence indicates
Speaker 1: quote that also surviving could be a sizeable fragment resembling
Speaker 1: a devolatilized aggregate of loosely bound dust screens that may
Speaker 1: have exotic shape, peculiar rotational properties, and extremely high porosity.
Speaker 1: So uh so weird shape tumbling being very porous and
Speaker 1: not very dense. De volatilized of course, because as it
Speaker 1: passed close to the sun, it lost all of its
Speaker 1: volatile molecules like water and stuff, and all that stuff
Speaker 1: would get turned to gas or vaporized, gased out and released,
Speaker 1: and then what you'd have behind is this this object,
Speaker 1: this collection of dust grains. Um So, to continue with
Speaker 1: his words, so that was all acquired quote in the
Speaker 1: course of the disintegration event, given that the brightness of
Speaker 1: Mumu's parent could not possibly equal or exceed the Bordal
Speaker 1: survival limit. I'll get back to that with with Mr Bordle,
Speaker 1: there are reasons to believe that it suffered from the
Speaker 1: same fate as do the frail comments. The post parahelion observations, then,
Speaker 1: do not refer to the object that was entering the
Speaker 1: inner Solar System in early seventeen, as is tacitly assumed,
Speaker 1: but to its debris. So here when he when he
Speaker 1: mentions Bordle the border limit, he's referring to existing research
Speaker 1: by the American amateur astronomer Johnny Bordle showing that faint
Speaker 1: comments with very elongated orbits that pass within one earth
Speaker 1: distance from the Sun will usually tend to shatter right
Speaker 1: before the closest part of their orbit with the Sun.
Speaker 1: UH quote the object is a desiccated comment that lost
Speaker 1: most of its water and gases when it swooped close
Speaker 1: to the Sun. It's like a skeleton of the original
Speaker 1: body with all the ice out. A Secondina also writes
Speaker 1: that consistent with what we've seen in a couple of
Speaker 1: other frail comments that shattered like this when they passed
Speaker 1: close to the Sun. UH quote as a monstrous fluffy
Speaker 1: dust aggregate and released in the recent explosive event. Umu
Speaker 1: mua should be of strongly irregular shape, tumbling, not out gassing,
Speaker 1: and subjected to the effects of solar radiation pressure, consistent
Speaker 1: with observation. So he's basically saying, like an object like
Speaker 1: this that came close to the Sun sort of blew
Speaker 1: apart because it was getting heated up by the Sun
Speaker 1: as it was passing around UH, suffered this disintegration event,
Speaker 1: and then continued to fly on as this remnant piece.
Speaker 1: It would match all of the stuff we've seen so far,
Speaker 1: including the stuff that that that Avy Loeb was talking about,
Speaker 1: with it being subjected to the effects of solar radiation
Speaker 1: pressure which would help its speed up as it made
Speaker 1: its way out of the Solar system. Now there's one.
Speaker 1: So if Seconding is correct, one implication is that if
Speaker 1: such a shattering occurred, and if we don't know exactly
Speaker 1: when it occurred, this complicates our attempts to locate the
Speaker 1: origin of the object. Right as best I can tell, like,
Speaker 1: it still looks like it probably came from outside the
Speaker 1: Solar system, but it makes it harder to pinpoint like
Speaker 1: which other star it could have come from if at
Speaker 1: some point it like shattered and exploded and started tumbling
Speaker 1: and now we the part of its path that we
Speaker 1: can see is only after that happened. Does it complicate
Speaker 1: the idea that it could have been a spaceship? Does it?
Speaker 1: Does it make does it help people out if they
Speaker 1: really wanted to be a spaceship or is this? Uh?
Speaker 1: If Seconding is correct, I think it is definitely not
Speaker 1: a spaceship. This would pretty much completely rule that out
Speaker 1: unless it was a spaceship that was made of the
Speaker 1: stuff that comments are usually made of. So you're saying
Speaker 1: there's a chance, and so is Seconding a We're not
Speaker 1: sure yet. I love the idea of this. Objects like
Speaker 1: this tumbling spindle of dust grains held together by gravity
Speaker 1: left over after a comet kind of exploded or disintegrated
Speaker 1: from passing close to the Sun. Uh. There's actually one
Speaker 1: more development in mummuah news that I also thought was interesting.
Speaker 1: So in the wake of the discovery of Umu Mua,
Speaker 1: some astronomers postulated that maybe it's just that interstellar objects
Speaker 1: are traveling through our Solar System all the time. They're
Speaker 1: much more common than we thought. You know, maybe that's
Speaker 1: why we're seeing this, the idea being that we were
Speaker 1: just reaching the point where we have the capabilities to
Speaker 1: observe these things. And if that's the case, this is
Speaker 1: not going to be the just the singular uh interstellar traveler.
Speaker 1: We will start seeing more of them, not because they're
Speaker 1: suddenly occurring. They've the ideas, they've been occurring all along,
Speaker 1: but we are suddenly at a point where we can
Speaker 1: observe them, right, So it's not that it's super rare,
Speaker 1: it's just it just happened to be the first one
Speaker 1: we caught with our telescopes. Well, and now it appears
Speaker 1: that Mumua is not alone and being confirmed as an
Speaker 1: interstellar object. I was just reading a Good Nazi article
Speaker 1: by Michael Greshko from October nineteen about the discovery of
Speaker 1: another confirmed interstellar object called Borisov. This was discovered on
Speaker 1: August nineteen by a Crimean amateur astronomer named Gennedy Borisov, and,
Speaker 1: unlike Omama, Borisov was caught before its parahelion, so there
Speaker 1: is a chance that it could answer some questions that
Speaker 1: Omuamua left open. So far, it appears to be pretty
Speaker 1: similar to comments from within our solar system, which is interesting,
Speaker 1: so maybe a comment from another star actually looks a
Speaker 1: lot like comets from our own solar system. Early analysis
Speaker 1: revealed it was spitting out a lot of cyanide as
Speaker 1: it traveled, but apparently local comments do that as well.
Speaker 1: It appears to have a pretty normal commentary core uh
Speaker 1: solid nucleus within a cloud of gas and dust, and
Speaker 1: the earlier estimates put the core somewhere between like half
Speaker 1: a mile and two miles wide, so like zero point
Speaker 1: eight to three point two kilometers. That was in October.
Speaker 1: Borisov actually passed its Parahelian in early December of twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: So I was reading some of the recent reports about
Speaker 1: these observations. There was a NASA News feature that had
Speaker 1: images created by the Hubble Space Telescope of the object
Speaker 1: as it was near the Sun. I've got these here
Speaker 1: for you, Robert. It looks suitably haunting. Yes, it's chemical
Speaker 1: composition appears to be again roughly the same as comments
Speaker 1: inside our solar system, and we we've got a better
Speaker 1: idea of exactly what its size was. Hubble came up
Speaker 1: with the accurate figure of about thirty two feet or
Speaker 1: about nine hundred and seventy five across for the nucleus,
Speaker 1: which you know is roughly a kilometer or so. Uh so,
Speaker 1: very cool. Maybe we're gonna start seeing these things all
Speaker 1: the time. Yeah, it's it's one of the it's it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of like a revelation that is at once
Speaker 1: amazing but also maybe in some ways a little uh
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna say terrifying. I don't want to say that,
Speaker 1: but but it is like this, this this contemption, I mean,
Speaker 1: is is like space exploration in general, the perpetual understanding
Speaker 1: of a of a larger cosmos. Uh. And the more
Speaker 1: that we understand, the more new questions we have about
Speaker 1: how everything works. Uh so um. Yeah, it's gonna be
Speaker 1: interesting to see how just the next year of observation
Speaker 1: pans out. You know, will we see more interstellar objects?
Speaker 1: And if so, how many? You know? Ultimately, like what
Speaker 1: is going to be the uh you know, a realistic
Speaker 1: rate of interstellar objects passing through our solar system? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I don't know, but I can't wait to find out.
Speaker 1: I can't wait to get some really weird ones. I
Speaker 1: guess if there's anything disappointing here, I mean, I love
Speaker 1: this discovery. But if we're seeing okay, so a comment
Speaker 1: from another star looks very much like, at least so
Speaker 1: far like comments from our own neighborhood. When do we
Speaker 1: get a super weird one? When do we get one
Speaker 1: that I don't know, you know, comes from a star
Speaker 1: made out of mice or something, right? Right? I mean
Speaker 1: it takes me back to our recent episode discussing new
Speaker 1: Horizons and Pluto, you know, and how there's always that
Speaker 1: there's always that that risk that that the thing that
Speaker 1: you want to study will be kind of boring. But
Speaker 1: you know, oftentimes the the universe has has has has
Speaker 1: weirdness in store for us. So it'll be interesting to
Speaker 1: see what kind of weirdness we see. I think maybe
Speaker 1: one thing we've learned from doing the show is that
Speaker 1: even if something looks maybe kind of boring at first,
Speaker 1: if you look at it deep enough, it gets weird.
Speaker 1: It does, it definitely gets weird, all right. So there
Speaker 1: you have it again, just a couple of updates on
Speaker 1: some past episodes. We may do more of these in
Speaker 1: the future. We'll see. But well, you know, I think
Speaker 1: we are in that we're recording this before the New year.
Speaker 1: I think this is what the first episode of the
Speaker 1: new year. I'm not sure. Maybe so so if it
Speaker 1: is Happy New Year. If not, um, you know, I guess,
Speaker 1: just Happy Tuesday or Thursday. But in either In either case,
Speaker 1: we are looking forward to bringing you a lot of
Speaker 1: new episodes in we're looking forward you getting into a
Speaker 1: lot of weird topics and uh yeah, we're looking forward
Speaker 1: to the journey and we hope you'll stick with us
Speaker 1: through that journey. In the meantime, if you had own
Speaker 1: over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, that'll
Speaker 1: shoot you over to a place where you can find
Speaker 1: episodes of the show. And you can find episodes of
Speaker 1: the show wherever you get podcasts these days. Uh you know,
Speaker 1: whichever one feels like the best fit for you personally,
Speaker 1: I guess. And whatever that website happens to be, make
Speaker 1: sure that you subscribe and rate and review, because that
Speaker 1: helps the show out in the long run. Huge thanks
Speaker 1: as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to get in touch with us with
Speaker 1: feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
Speaker 1: topic for the future, just to say hello, you can
Speaker 1: email us at contact at stuff to Blow your mind
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