Dr. Melissa Rice, Mars Rover specialist and friend of the show, is back! Dr. Rice and Dr. Jim Davenport talk with us about planets, the habitable zone and what is so important about the Trappist-1 system.
Please enjoy this show where we speculate about planets outside our solar system (exoplanets) and compare them to the amazing moons that orbit Saturn and Jupiter.
Image Courtesy of NASA
Click Here for Transcript
>>Here we go!
[? Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]
? Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
? Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
? As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
? Cyclotron and any and every mic
? You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
? Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow
? Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
? I’m every element around
Dr. Regina: Welcome to Spark Science, where we explore stories of human curiosity. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff and I’m an astrophysicist and pop culture enthusiast.
Jordan: And I’m Jordan Baker, comedian, home inspector, and naturally curious person.
Dr. Regina: Joining us today in studio is Dr. Melissa Rice, planetary geologist, Western professor, and our resident Martian, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. And Dr. Jim Davenport, astrophysicist and science blogger.
Jordan: We’re here today to talk about exoplanets. Thank you all for coming, because I want to know more about exoplanets too!
Dr. Regina: Let’s talk about this famous announcement that came out recently, the Trappist-1 announcement. So, we all have kind of a minimal– or I have a minimal understanding about this announcement, but I’m going to let you or Melissa take it away. What was this announcement and why is it so exciting?
Jim: So, the Trappist star has a really long telephone number for a name, like 21NSJ1823… it’s like 20 digits long. It got shortened to Trappist because the star was first observed with the Trappist telescope.
Dr. Regina: Right.
Jordan: Which is of course named after the monks who brew beer.
Jim: Yeah, I think that’s right. I actually don’t know why they call it Trappist.
Jordan: Okay.
Dr. Regina: I think it was a dude, though, right?
Jordan: It’s gotta be a dude!
Dr. Regina: It was some old dude. I’m probably wrong, actually.
Jim: At the break we’ll go to Wikipedia.
Dr. Regina: Right, and then we’ll come back and talk about it.
Jordan: Do the research during the show!
[Laughing.]
Jim: And then we’ll fix it in post.
Dr. Regina: I think maybe our watchers and listeners would be interested in it, and maybe even Jordan. There’s so many things in the universe. There are so many things that we observe. All these objects have super long names.
Jim: That’s right. We give them these ridiculous telephone numbers for names because–
Dr. Regina: They’re longer than telephone numbers.
Jim: Yeah, that’s right. We have to keep track of you know, 10 million or a billion of these objects in a given survey. So, Trappist-1 was the first star observed by the Trappist program that they found two planets around. So, that was cool. A few years ago they got really stoked about it. We have papers here that have some of the history around it.
Dr. Regina: That’s what we keep on looking to for our viewers.
Jim: Yeah, these papers here. So, they have two planets: Trappist-1 B and C. These are the two planets they first discovered. They followed up the system for years and years with Spitzer space telescope data, and with I think the Hubble space telescope, and they discovered in the Spitzer data, which is infrared, they discovered 5 other planets, so 7 planets total. For one of the planets, they only had a partial orbit. They only had like one or two transits.
Dr. Regina: And we’ll talk about, for listeners and viewers, how to find those and what do we mean by transits? We also talked about it in a previous show with Dr. Kevin Coby: Exoplanets, so this is like Exoplanets 2: Video.
Jim: Right. The video edition!
Dr. Regina: Yeah, the video edition. Okay, so they had a little, sort of data for one of these planets.
Jim: Sort of data for one of these planets. So they knew there were 7 planets, at least. And this is really exciting. This is the first system, besides the sun, where we know there are at least 7 planets. In our system we know there are 8 planets, it used to be 9.
Dr. Regina: We can get into that later.
Jordan: Let’s not talk about the controversy. We’re not a controversial show!
Jim: That’s a different episode! So, they killed Pluto…
Dr. Regina: [Laughing.] You’re like, “We’re not going talk about the controversy– so they killed Pluto…”
Jim: But it’s dead.
Dr. Regina: Yeah. It no longer exists.
Jim: So we know we need to be able to form planets around stars for life, like we know it, to be. So this is the first planet system that has at least 7 planets, which is cool because it is a new record for planets around a single star.
Jordan: Well what was the old record?
Jim: It was like 5, maybe 6.
Jordan: That’s pretty good!
Jim: 5 is pretty good. That’s a lot. What are you gonna do with 5 planets?
Jordan: I don’t know. You can do somethin’, right?
Dr. Regina: From what I watched and read about it, the other cool thing about this system is that there are a fair amount of planets inside the habitable zone. I’m gonna throw my question to Melissa now. So once we have those 3 planets in the habitable zone, now we have planets like Mars, which you study, and maybe we could have earth and things with water, right?
Melissa: Yeah. So, first let’s define what a habitable zone is. So, it’s basically what it sounds like; the zone in which we think planetary surfaces might be inhabitable. That doesn’t mean that they’re inhabited. We’re not making the leap to say that ET exists on any of these planets yet.
So, we have this way of estimating which of these planets might be habitable, and by that we just mean liquid water theoretically could be stable on the surface. So, planets that are too close to the star are too close to be in the habitable zone because they’re too hot and any water on the surface would boil away. So, Venus is in that situation in our solar system.
Planets that are too far away from the star– any water on the surface would be frozen all the time. We don’t think that’s a place where life can really thrive and take hold, so that is outside habitable zone. Mars, in our solar system, is just on the edge of that. In our solar system, aliens in the Trappist planets looking at us would probably guess that Earth would be the inhabited planet, because we are in that habitable zone. Some people call it the goldilocks zone or the sweet spot.
Jordan: Sweet spot.
Melissa: So how many– Jim I forgot, how many of the Trappist planets are in this classic habitable zone?
Jim: In the classic habitable zone it’s 3, as Regina said. Something like 3 of them. One’s on the inner edge, one’s in the middle, and one’s on the outer edge.
Dr. Regina: Like us! It’s like looking in a mirror.
Jim: That’s right. What I think is important to remember though is this star is very small. This is what’s called a cool dwarf, an M dwarf.
Dr. Regina: Which is what you studied in graduate school.
Melissa: ‘Cause he’s a hip guy!
Jordan: I was gonna say!
Melissa: They’re cool stars!
Jim: I was studying cool stars well before they were cool!
[All laughing.]
Melissa: Which is what makes you hip!
Jim: Which is why I’m so hip, yeah.
Dr. Regina: You’re the first hipster.
Jim: That’s true. So this star is much smaller than the sun, so we have to shrink the habitable zone accordingly. If you make the fire smaller, you gotta move in closer to stay warm. The same analogy goes with the habitable zone. As you make the star small, like 10% or 12% of the mass of the sun– it’s really small.
Jordan: So, how big are the planets?
Dr. Regina: Good question.
Jim: So the planets are roughly Earth or Mars size. They appear to be the right size for earthlike planets.
Dr. Regina: So they be to be really close!
Jim: They’re really close. These things have a year– so their entire orbit around the star, a year for these guys is like 10 days, 12 days. The longest one is something like 18 days. 18 days to go all the way around the star, which gives you an idea how close they are. They are right up close to the star.
So, while there’s still a lot of planets, and they are the right size (we think) to be rocky, Earth-like or Mars-like plants, they are really close to the star. So, there’s some different rules that may apply here in terms of what we call habitable. The classic habitable zone is 3 planets, but whether any of them are actually habitable I think is another interesting question.
Melissa: Right, they’re showing these artist renditions of these planets–
Dr. Regina: We have some of those here.
Melissa: They all look like variations of the earth. In the artist renderings they have various amounts of water on the surface, clouds, rocky bits, but we have no idea what these planets are made of. We don’t even know for sure that they have solid surfaces, although they’re in close enough to their star, they probably formed from rocky and metal bits and they probably have solid surfaces. But we have no idea if they have atmospheres, we have no idea if there is water on their surface to even be in a liquid form.
Dr. Regina: Or if they have magnetic fields to keep them protected from radiation, right?
Melissa: Right, so I think that a lot of the wild speculation that you see in news stories and blogs online– that’s wishful thinking. There’s definitely the potential for these guys to be habitable, but we have no idea. All we know is that they are in this theoretical spot. What we’re learning from the exploration of our own solar system is that you don’t have to just be in this classical habitable zone that’s the right distance from your campfire.
The habitable zone doesn’t necessarily have to be a sweet spot distance from the sun, but maybe the habitable zone is a sweet spot distance beneath the surface of a planet. In our own solar system, aside from earth, the only places we think might be inhabitable today are the icy moons in the outer solar system, way outside of this classic habitable zone, that are places where there might be oceans underneath the surface.
Dr. Regina: Right, like Europa; my favorite moon ever.
Melissa: Yeah. So some of these Trappist planets that might be outside the habitable zone, they’re not getting as much love or talk today, but maybe those are the ones that are actually habitable because they have water– maybe not on the surface, but deeper underneath.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Early late at night
? I wander off into a land
? You can go, but you mustn’t tell a soul
? There’s a world inside
? Where dreamers meet each other
Dr. Regina: Thanks for listening to Spark Science. You are listening to our interview about exoplanets in the habitable zone with Dr. Rice and Dr. Davenport.
Jim: I think it’s also to remember that these stars aren’t eternal, aren’t constant over all time. In the past, Trappist the star was probably a lot hotter. So, if these planets have been in the same location the whole time, they may have been uninhabitable and as Trappist as cooled, onto sort of its main sequence lifetime, they may now technically be in the habitable zone. So this outer planet may have been the sweet spot, and that habitable zone has sort of walked inwards as the star has cooled.
Melissa: Or, on the flip side, planets move around too. So, we can’t assume that these planets have always been in this order of 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 their entire period. They switch places–
Jordan: They could have all been Plutos!
Melissa: They could’ve! Planetary migration is an ongoing field right now.
Dr. Regina: Let’s talk about planetary migration because I don’t understand it at all. For any of the classes I’ve taken in undergrad and in grad school it was like “it gets hit by something and then it moves” or “it has a really, really wonky orbit.” Is there other explanations for planetary movement in a solar system?
Melissa: Yeah, there are models planetary migration and planets swapping places within our own solar system.
Dr. Regina: How?
Melissa: Just from gravitational interactions. The physics of that is beyond anything I can describe here let alone even understand.
Dr. Regina: It would be a slow process, though. We’re not talking like a giant asteroid comes in and knocks it out.
Jordan: Like billiards!
Melissa: So in geological timescales, it would still be a fast catastrophic thing, very soon after the formation of the planets. So, there is a model where planets in our own solar system, the large gas giant planets, have switched places.
Through the gravitational interactions of those planets switching places, they basically create chaos in the outer solar system, fling any small asteroid sized bodies or planets that haven’t quite formed yet, fling some of them to the inner solar system. They bombard the surface of the Moon and Mars, and the surface of the Earth, and maybe wreak havoc for early lifeforms just starting to take hold. And we actually have a record of this–
Dr. Regina: The dinosaurs!
Melissa: This would have been way before the dinosaurs. This would have been like their bacterial ancestors. But we do have this record on the moon of this one period in time when it seemed like the Moon was just getting pummeled all at once.
One explanation for this, called the “late heavy bombardment,” this period when the Moon was just being pummeled by all these things at once, this is when planetary migration was occurring way out in the outer solar system, flinging things into the inner solar system, and banging up the Moon.
At the same time, things could have also been flung out to the far reaches of the solar system. Maybe that’s a way to get Kuiper belt objects so far away, and things into even the Oort cloud. So, planetary migration can F stuff up.
[All laughing.]
Jordan: Is that why the Moon looks like Swiss cheese, because it has a bunch of dents all over it?
Melissa: Yeah, exactly. It’s just busted up. It’s been beat up.
Jordan: It’s been hurt. It’s been hurt. It’s been hurt.
Melissa: It was the nerd of the solar system.
Jordan: It’s been shoved into a locker.
Dr. Regina: I never took planetary geology. All of my astronomy classes were like, not about the planets at all. But you were gonna add something.
Jim: I was just going to add that, as Melissa’s saying, the Moon took a beating, but so did the earth. The earth would have had to take that same beating, you just don’t see it anymore because of oceans and wind, and you know, what we call weather.
Dr. Regina: “What we call weather.” [Laughing.]
Jordan: What?
Jim: Hold on: weather.
Jordan: Tell me more.
Jim: Like rain.
Melissa: Isn’t that a Chinese hoax?
Dr. Regina: Yeah.
[All laughing.]
What’s good about our video recording too is that– for our listeners, I’m so very sorry– but for our watchers, I’m going to ask the students to put in picture of weather, and put in pictures of these Trappist artist renditions. So, we’ll be able to see that.
Jim: Yeah, look at this beautiful day here on Trappist. I mean this is like– is that like a boat down there?
Jordan: Yeah. [Laughing.]
Dr. Regina: And there’s actually jobs– you can get jobs doing these artist renditions. I want to take us a step back, because I do want to talk about your own fields and how they relate to exoplanets. But before we do that, Melissa has been on every season. This is our third season.
Melissa: Let’s keep it going!
Jordan: Congratulations!
Dr. Regina: Dr. Rice was our first guest. For our listeners, is this is new to them, I kind of what to ask you and Jim to explain what you do, and how you got into that. I like to have our listeners know who they’re listening to. I’m gonna let Melissa go first because she’s always first.
[Laughing.]
Melissa: So, I don’t remember what I’ve said before, so hopefully it is consistent. Hopefully it is the same story every time.
[All laughing.]
Jordan: I’ve got it logged in here; I’m gonna catch ya!
Melissa: So, when I went to college I didn’t know what I really wanted to study. I went to a liberal arts college, kind of like Western, that had a huge range of possible things I could study so that I could take the sample platter and figure it out. I knew that astronomy was one of the options that I was considering, along with environmental science, women’s studies, biology, pre-med, etc. So, I wanted to go to a place that had a telescope.
So I went to college and was taking some classes, and eventually worked out that yeah, this astronomy thing is pretty cool. That was an interest I’d had since I was a little kid. Regina knows that I still haven’t really watched Star Trek. It’s a shame in my field!
[All laughing.]
Dr. Regina: Let’s segregate now.
Jordan: The table is divided!
Melissa: We’re trying to create a more inclusive field.
Dr. Regina: That’s actually my job. [Laughing.] That is my job.
Melissa: So, don’t exclude the Star Trek ignorant.
Dr. Regina: I’m not. I’m trying to be open-minded about it.
Melissa: A lot of people we work with in astronomy, and Jim I’m sure you’ve experienced this too, they knew they were gonna be astronomers from day 1.
Dr. Regina: Right. They were like “I learned how to walk, then I looked up in the stars. I was gonna be an astronomer.”
Melissa: Exactly.
Jim: And then they show up here.
Melissa: I think that certainty is intimidating to people who get to college, or even beyond, and still have no idea what they want to do. And then they think, “Oh, well everyone I know whose a scientist and who studies space, they’ve known they want to do that and have been working towards it since day one. That means that those opportunities are closed for me.”
I just like to emphasize that I wasn’t a super-science-y kid who was on this one track, because hopefully somebody out there whose maybe still trying to declare their major, or doesn’t know what they want to do– it’s not too late, it’s never too late. I know people who have gone back to school in their 40s to become professional astronomer and are doing exceptionally well. So, it’s never too late.
Dr. Regina: My dad’s going back to school, going to college for the first time, and gonna be an anthropologist, and he’s 63. So, yeah.
Melissa: Good for him.
Dr. Regina: I do want to reiterate what you’re saying because we’ve had a lot of guests on, and Jordan may remember this, but not every one of them has said “from the day I was little I’ve known.” A good amount of them have said like, “I kinda figured it out in college.”
Melissa: That’s what college should be for, the figuring it out place.
Dr. Regina: Yeah, it’s hard though. So, what is your research now? Just to kind of add on to that.
Melissa: When I was in college, I decided on astronomy. At the very end of college, I realized that there was this place called Mars– well let’s say my astronomy education was not so bad up to that point that it took me until my senior year to realize there was a place called Mars.
But what it did take me to my senior year to realize was that Mars was not just a planet, but a world. It had geology, it had landscapes, it had all sorts of things that I had experience with here on earth. So, unlike things like black holes, pulsars, galaxies, nebulae– they weren’t just theoretical constructs. Mars was a place that I could have some sort of resonance with my own experience as a person on a planet, so I was like “Hey, that’s cool,” and kind of meld the experiential with the intellectual and do not just astronomy but geology at the same time.
So, I figured out Mars was where it was at, went to grad school to work with the Mars rover program, which was being operated out of Cornell University, and went there for my PhD. It just so happened that at the time I was finishing my PhD, that was when the Curiosity rover was about to land. So, timing worked out really well for me to graduate and go work for the new rover mission, the Curiosity rover. And then, I got a job up here at Western, and NASA allowed me to stay affiliated with the Curiosity rover mission, so I can still do that, but from here in Bellingham.
Dr. Regina: Yeah, and that was our first episode, so people can check that out.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Dance in the trees
? Paint mysteries
? The magnificent droid plays there
? Your magic mind
? Makes love to mine
? I think I’m in love, angel
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
Dr. Regina: Welcome back to Spark Science. We are talking with Dr. Jim Davenport and Dr. Melissa Rice about exoplanets. I’m gonna bring it back to Jim and he’s gonna talk about his background a little bit. At the break, we did like we said we would and looked up why it’s called Trappist-1.
Jim: Trappist stands for “transiting planets and planetesimals small telescope.”
Dr. Regina: Wow, so it wasn’t some dude. I am sexist!
Jordan: Planetesimals?
Jim: Yeah, so these are like mini-, proto-, baby planets.
Jordan: Proto-baby-planets.
Jim: So we think, like Melissa was talking about with the formation of the solar system, planets swapping places, things running into each other– these big early, proto-planetary things are called planetesimals, or like small objects. Like Pluto, right?
Dr. Regina: Like Pluto!
Melissa: Yeah!
Jordan: We just killed off Pluto, though.
Dr. Regina: Well it’s still there, it’s just a teenager.
Melissa: So it grew up to be a dwarf planet instead of a real planet.
Jordan: Ah, that’s a hot topic.
Dr. Regina: Yeah, it is.
So, back to Jim’s background, we’ve been talking about non-stereotypical, like, how you get into science, how you got your PhD, and that kind of stuff. Since I’ve known you for a while, it’s not like the exact same story as a lot of the faculty here.
Jim: Okay, cool.
Dr. Regina: Is that an insult? I don’t know.
Jim: Nah, I mean, it’s cool to be unique.
Dr. Regina: Yeah, sure it is!
Jim: To mirror what Melissa was saying, when I was 18 going off to college, I was totally convinced I knew what I was going to do, and I was going to be an astronaut. That was my goal.
Dr. Regina: And that’s what you wanted since you were a baby?
Jim: Since I was a kid, I watched way too many versions of Apollo 13. I wore that VHS tape out.
Dr. Regina: You also love Tom hanks.
Jim: I’m a huge Tom Hanks fan. Yeah. That’s true, actually.
Dr. Regina: “I love you, Tom Hanks.” Just send it out into the world.
Jim: Right. “Call me.” So, I watched a lot of Apollo 13, etc. I was a Star Trek fan, but I agree with Melissa that it’s not required to be a professional astronomer.
Dr. Regina: Next Gen?
Jim: Uh, DS9. So I went to college, and being 18 I was totally convinced that I knew what I was going to do. “I’m going to be an astronaut, I’m going to be an airspace engineer,” because that sounded like how you get to space, was you build a spaceship.
Dr. Regina: You build it and then you get in it. That was your thought process, right?
Jim: Well, look at the resumes of the people who have “astronaut” as their job title, and a bunch of them are engineers.
Dr. Regina: A lot of them are pilots, too.
Jim: Well that was not in the cards. So, I was clearly not built to be an air force pilot, so I thought “what else can I do?” “I can learn math,” was the answer.
Dr. Regina: Real good.
Jim: Yeah! So, I went to college, and was really bad at becoming an engineer. Like, bombing my classes, not getting into the major– I was not competitive. It was a good check with reality. I was like, “Okay, this is obviously not what I’m going to be doing.”
Dr. Regina: But instead of giving up on your dreams, what did you do?
Jim: You know, you do the college wander around thing. I also went to a big school where there was a lot of majors, and so I tried a lot of different things out, and I contemplated a lot of different career paths, and in the meanwhile I was taking science and math classes, knowing it was going to be somewhere in the sciences and math field that I wanted to land.
I took an Intro to Astronomy class, and then my girlfriend at the time, who became my wife, also took an astronomy class. It was like an Intro to Astronomy 101. I was like doing her homework, and she got an A, so I felt good about that.
Dr. Regina: Should we put that online? “I did her homework.”
[All laughing.]
Jim: Nah, I mean, “I helped her with her homework.”
Dr. Regina: She’s very successful.
Jim: She’s way smarter than I am, so it worked out totally okay. I was like “Wow, this astronomy thing is actually awesome and maybe I should check this out,” and so I took a few more classes, joined the major, and then got like super sold on it. I was like “Yeah, I’m gonna be an astronomer. So now that I’m like 20, I figured it out.”
Melissa: That’s a rough 2 years of uncertainty there.
Jim: 2 years later, you got it. So, figured it out once again, moved forward, and I’m looking at the career path and I’m like “Alright, how am I gonna be an astronaut being an astronomer?” So, astronomy, astronaut, seems like only a little bit of a different word, so–
Dr. Regina: The same root!
[All laughing.]
Jim: I was like, “I gotta apply to grad school, because that’s how you be an astronomer, thus, I can be an astronaut.” Gotta be a PhD. So I applied to all these grad schools, and didn’t get in to any of them. That was an expensive and–
Dr. Regina: That was when I met you.
Jim: Right! Well, it was right after that. It was like the next day. So, applying to grad school, for people who don’t know, is like a really difficult, stressful, soul-baring, and expensive process. So you’re looking at shelling out– for 11 grad schools I was out like $1300.
I had been like working at the library shelving books, so I was not loaded. That forced me to– and I guess this is the non-traditional part, or real life part– to think about “What am I gonna do?” I was like a mediocre student, in the end of it, who just got really stoked about science, but not by doing his homework.
I ended up at a terminal master’s program, meaning–
Jordan: That you die.
[All laughing.]
Jim: Kind of. Meaning only a 2 year program, only a masters. There’s no chance of going on. You know this.
Dr. Regina: Yeah, for our listeners and watchers, I had met Jim in his last year of undergrad, and I was in my third year or second year of graduate school, and I had done a terminal masters at San Diego State University, because I didn’t know what I wanted to do after I got my bachelor’s degree, and I was very unsure, and did terribly on the GRE.
Jordan: What’s the GRE?
Jim: The Graduate Record Exam?
Dr. Regina: It’s like the SAT to get into college, but to get into graduate school. So, General Required…
Jordan: Well I’m glad you guys know about it.
[All laughing.]
Jim: We didn’t do good on it!
Dr. Regina: We didn’t do well!
Jordan: Clearly!
Melissa: That’s the first question on the exam: “What does GRE stand for?”
Dr. Regina: Graduate Record Exam. So, I went to San Diego State and got my terminal master’s degree, which means, yeah, you just have that masters. It’s mostly for people in industry that only need a masters. They’re not using it to like go on and get a PhD.
So I did mine in physics, and I had just met Jim, and he was telling me “I’m thinking I’m gonna go get a terminal masters in astronomy,” and I was like “where?” He was like, “San Diego State,” and I’m like, “Oh my god, me too!” I already did that!
Jim: There’s only like two– there are hundreds of places you can get a PhD in the United States in astronomy and physics, but there are like two places you can get a terminal masters. There’s lots of places where you can get a masters and decide it isn’t for you and just walk away from the field, but only two places that I know of where you can get a masters explicitly in astronomy. One is San Diego State University, the other is Wesleyan, which I’ve not been to, but I’ve heard it’s really excellent.
Jordan: Wesleyan?
Dr. Regina: Where is that?
Jim: Connecticut?
Dr. Regina: Not Wellesley?
Jim: No.
Dr. Regina: Those get confused all the time.
Jim: It’s on the east coast.
Dr. Regina: This will only be viewed from the West Coast.
Jim: So it’s all the same!
Dr. Regina: But yeah, I kinda used it because there are these things called bridge programs now. If you’re not the best student, or maybe you didn’t get any research experience in undergrad, you need something to transition and go into grad school and get your PhD. So there are these programs that help you with that. It’s like a transition time between your bachelor’s degree and your PhD program. These terminal masters basically, I mean, they were that before there were bridge programs. We kind of made our own bridge program.
Jim: I think I’ve heard you say this too, where a lot of people say, “Why would you go get a masters in astronomy? That’s useless.” It’s not useless. It was a good means to an end. It was hard. It was two hard years of having to do all the growing–
Dr. Regina: I didn’t say it was useless, I said it was like the means to the end.
Jim: I’ve heard from other people, though. It was a hard couple years, but it was a good means to an end, and I would recommend it. It was two years of learning how to be a good student, and getting rid of all the bad habits that sort of put me in that situation.
Dr. Regina: Absolutely.
Jim: In the end, I had a degree where I could have walked away and done something cool in the tech industry, or something. But instead I said, “Yeah, I wanna stay in this,” and I fared much better in the PhD application round the next time, and I actually got into a school, and the rest was history.
Dr. Regina: And now you’re a hotshot postdoc!
Jim: Postdoc, yeah! So, right now my title sounds great–
Jordan: Yeah, whoa! He’s a hotshot postdoc!
Dr. Regina: There’s only so many at Western, right? How many science postdocs are there at Western?
Jim: There’s one.
[All laughing.]
Jim: So right now, I’m a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow.
Dr. Regina: Those are hard to get!
Jim: Yeah! So there’s about–
Jordan: I mean I never tried, but I could probably do it.
Jim: Yeah, probably. That’s probably true. There’s probably like 8 a year, 8 or 10 a year.
Dr. Regina: In the whole nation?
Jim: Yeah.
Jordan: How many people are actually applying?
Dr. Regina: Like a thousand.
Jim: No, not even. It’s like a hundred.
Jordan: Maybe.
Jim: I think that’s about right. It’s like a 3-year postdoctoral gig. So, I finished my PhD a year and a half ago, 2 years ago, and I’ve been doing this now for almost 2 years. So, I have one more year left here in beautiful Bellingham, and then I’ll be off to the next adventure!
Dr. Regina: So, what’s your research and how does that relate to what we’re talking about today?
Jim: Here’s the tie-in. My research focuses not on the data that the research was discovered in, but instead I focus on data from the NASA Kepler mission. So, Kepler was explicitly designed as an exoplanet hunting telescope. So, Kepler spent 4 years just staring at one patch of the sky– the same patch of the sky– with an unblinking eye. Every 30 minutes it took a picture of that patch of sky.
Jordan: That’s kind of blinking.
Jim: It’s a really short blink.
Jordan: It’s 30 minutes…
Jim: But 30 minutes over a year.
Jordan: I’m just saying, you said it was an unblinking eye, and it’s blinking.
Jim: Just a short blink.
[All laughing.]
Jordan: I’m gonna take a quick little– I’m just blinking! 30 minute blink!
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
? The grass grows inside
? The music floats you gently on your toes
? Touch the nose, he’ll change your clothes to tuxedos
? Don’t freak and hide
? I’ll be your secret santa, do you mind?
? Don’t resist
? The fairygods will have a fit
? We should dance
? Dance in the trees
? Paint mysteries
? The magnificent droid plays there
Dr. Regina: Welcome back to Spark Science. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff and you are listening to our interview with Dr. Melissa Rice and Dr. Jim Davenport on the discovery of the Trappist-1 planetary system.
Jim: So, Kepler stares at the same patch of the sky, and what it’s looking for is a planet passing in front of its parent star. So, passing between us and the parent star. When it does that, it blocks out a very small amount of light. This is what we call a transit, or an eclipse.
Dr. Regina: Are the Trappists, are they not using the same kind of method?
Jim: They are. So Trappist was outside of the standard Kepler field. Kepler picked one field and had to stay there. Trappist was off some other direction.
Dr. Regina: But Kepler stuff like stopped working, right? We have a show on that. Check that out, listeners.
Jim: Check out the link right here. Is that not how this works?
Dr. Regina: Yeah! We’ll do that.
Jordan: It’s an infomercial.
Jim: Call now! So, Kepler had hardware malfunction, and could not stably point at one location anymore, and instead, through some really brilliant engineering was able to stare for 90 days at a time at selected fields, and stay quasi-stable, and look at fields for a short amount of time. Not 4 years, but 90-day chunks.
Trappist, by total circumstance of luck and good planning, was able to fall into one of those fields. So, why I’m excited about Trappist is a few weeks ago, NASA released– and they do this every quarter, but they did this extra fast for Trappist knowing that it was exciting and that a lot of people were wanting to get more data on Trappist– they released publicly, and you can go online and see the data for yourself, a whole 90-day or 75-day chunk of data on the Trappist system from Kepler. We call it K2, ’cause it’s the second version of Kepler. So, that’s why I get excited about it. I study the stars behind the planets.
Dr. Regina: So I’m gonna open this up to “let’s ask questions and let’s pretend we,” you know, theorize about the system. I’m gonna throw it over to Melissa. With this smaller star with possibly these 3 objects in the habitable zone, what would be the most awesome thing that we could find? What would be a really great scenario and how could we find that? Like you said, we don’t know if they have atmosphere, so how do we find that? If we did, what would that tell us?
Melissa: We can make all the speculations we want, but the data that Trappist might continue to collect, the data that K2 is releasing, it’s not gonna tell us what is actually on the surfaces of those planets. So, I think the next big advance in exoplanet science that’s gonna happen that’s gonna give us some of these hints is when we can start actually detecting planetary atmospheres. So, we can look at the sunlight that is passing through the edge of the planet, which would pass through some of that atmosphere and we’d see what gasses in the planet’s atmosphere are absorbing different wavelengths of sunlight.
There are things we can look for when we start to get that kind of data, which is gonna require a lot of sensitivity. When we can start seeing that, we can start looking for things in the atmosphere that don’t occur– I was gonna say naturally, but don’t occur without life. So, things like a lot of oxygen in the atmosphere like Earth has. If we weren’t here, “we” being life and everything within the tree of life, if we weren’t here on the planet then we would not have an oxygen atmosphere. We would not have this 20% O2 in our atmosphere. That is essentially “green things” constantly pumping oxygen into the atmosphere.
So, there has to be some kind of lifeform to keep the atmosphere in what would not be a natural atmosphere equilibrium state. If we look at one of these Trappist planets and we see a strong oxygen signal in its atmosphere, that would be really exciting, because that could be a nice finger-print for life. Also, if we see a lot of water vapor in the atmosphere, that may be a hint that water is evaporating from big bodies of water on the surface. Maybe some of that water vapor is raining out on the surface. Maybe these planets that are in the habitable zone might actually have water for life to inhabit.
So, those are some of the things that would be really exciting to find, and that we actually have a chance of learning in our lifetime.
Dr. Regina: So you’re saying that there’s nothing that we have now that has the sensitivity that has the sensitivity that can actually get that light going through the atmosphere and annualize it?
Melissa: Yeah, I don’t think so. Jim?
Jim: I think it’s been done for a handful of planets around brighter stars than Trappist. Trappist is quite faint. So, for some of the nearby brighter stars where the signal is stronger, I think it’s been done. I think Hubble Space Telescope is one of the places it’s been done. These features that Melissa is talking about are largely in the infrared. They’re easiest to see in the infrared, and for that we need an infrared telescope. So, for that NASA is building (and in a year and a half is launching) the James Webb Space Telescope, which is essentially the successor to Hubble. Its main goal is to look at planets like Trappist.
Dr. Regina: So, let me ask a real question. We do have to take a break soon, but I have one last question. What about objects that have atmospheres here in our solar system? For Melissa, what other objects in our solar system have atmospheres?
Melissa: Not many. Atmospheres are pretty rare. Venus has an atmosphere, but the problem is it has too much atmosphere. Its atmosphere is about 90 times denser than ours, which means greenhouse gasses, and the greenhouse effect is out of control. The surface of Venus is hot enough to melt lead. That’s not the kind of atmosphere we want to find on these Trappist planets if we’re interested in life.
Mars has an atmosphere; it’s just really thin right now. Its atmosphere is almost purely carbon dioxide, and so you’d think with all that CO2 in its atmosphere, greenhouse effect must be a thing. But, it has too little atmosphere for the greenhouse effect to really warm its surface.
Mars’ atmosphere is a hundred times thinner than earth’s atmosphere, so Earth, Mars, and Venus are kind of the goldilocks planets. One’s too hot for life, one’s too cold for life, too much atmosphere, not enough atmosphere, but the Earth is right in the middle. So, the Earth is the only planet that as an atmosphere that can sustain life as we know it, and sustain liquid water.
On Mars, the atmosphere is too thin for liquid water to even be theoretically possible, even if the temperatures warmed up on Mars, there’s just not enough pressure to sustain water in the liquid stage. Water behaves like CO2 does here on the earth. So, water would look like dry ice does here on Earth, where it goes directly from a solid block and it starts vaporizing into a gas.
If you try and melt a chunk of dry ice into liquid carbon dioxide, you can’t do it. You heat it up, you heat it up, and it just goes straight to gas. That’s because carbon dioxide requires higher pressures to be a liquid. Water requires higher pressures than are present on Mars to be a liquid. So, that’s a problem.
So, we think about the atmospheric pressure that you need to sustain liquid water. Well, what if life doesn’t even have to have water. What if it just needs some kind of solvent, some kind of liquid? That opens up all sorts of other possibilities. So, we’ve got this moon of Saturn called Titan.
Dr. Regina: I was just gonna say, what about Titan?
Melissa: So, Titan has a more earthlike atmosphere in its amount of atmosphere and the pressure of atmosphere, but Titan does not have an atmosphere that is made up of the same stuff. Titan’s atmosphere is hydrocarbons: methane and ethane. So, much different kind of atmosphere.
On Titan, it’s super, super cold ’cause it’s out at Saturn’s orbit, far away from the sun. Water is present on the surface, but it’s frozen solid. Water is is the rock. Mountains are made of water-ice. It’s a pretty wild place.
But there’s liquid on Titan that the atmospheric pressure can sustain, and it’s liquid hydrocarbons, so methane and ethane lakes, and rain, and rivers. So, that’s how my work, as someone who studies planets specifically in this solar system, gets translated into more of this exoplanet science. Once we start learning about other weird things that are present in our own solar system, that opens up all these possibilities for even weirder things that might exist out there in the Trappist system.
If we know that liquid methane/ethane is present here in our own solar system, what other liquids might be present over there that could have life emerging in totally different ways than we’ll ever imagine.
Dr. Regina: That’s an awesome place to break. We’re gonna bring back these kind of speculations on what these planets could possibly have.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
? This is your land
? This is my land
? We belong here
? Stay the night
? I am so inspired
? You touched my wires
? My supernova shining bright
Jordan: Welcome back to Spark Science. We’re talking with Jim Davenport and Melissa Rice about exoplanets. We were just talking about Titan, and you were saying that Titan was covered with frozen water, and I was thinking that water is sort of a precious resource that we like to have here, and people are always going for the next “water” thing: spring water, city tap water, etc. What if someone goes to Titan and opens up a water factory, bringing all the frozen chunks here, melting it down, and then selling it. You think that could be giving people super powers or?
Melissa: I think that’s gonna be the next trend among Hollywood divas. Titan water.
Jordan: That’s my idea, so if somebody wants to… it’s my idea and it’s patented, so give me the royalties.
Melissa: Asteroid mining is kind of an up and coming thing.
Jordan: Armageddon, we all saw it.
Melissa: So why not mine water? Hey, whatever gets us onto the surface of Titan’s. If it’s a bunch of water mining corporate people, go for it.
Dr. Regina: We’ve actually talked about this idea. I don’t know if it was on our Pluto show when we had that public event, but we were talking about this mission to Titan. It was going to be a boat, and it was going to sail in these methane seas. So, what happened to that proposed mission?
Melissa: That was a proposal for a funding program that has since gone through its process of selection, and the Titan boat was not one of the finalists.
Jordan: [Slamming table.] What is happening!
Dr. Regina: I know. We’re all that angry.
Jordan: A space boat! Who said no to a space boat?
Dr. Regina: What was picked instead?
Melissa: So, there are two missions going with the discovery program. One is going to an asteroid, a metallic asteroid. It’s like a big hunk of metal.
Jordan: Not as cool. We already know it’s a big hunk of metal.
Melissa: The other is going to a Trojan asteroid, which is a big hunk of rock.
Dr. Regina: I think they should have diversified there.
Jim: It’s in the shape of a horse.
Jordan: I thought it was in the shape of a condom. It’s round.
[All laughing.]
Dr. Regina: It’s a safe space! We could have a whole show on missions and how they don’t get funded, but I want to bring it back to like these speculations. We were talking about how it would be great if it could be like Earth, but even in these outer regions, there could be moons like Titan, and we should pay attention to and speculate on that as well. I think Jim was talking his work, which talks about flairs and sunspots, and that can also effect this goldilocks region.
Jim: With Trappist being a small star, the star itself is a slightly different makeup than the sun. The star is much more turbulent. The surface is like a pot of boiling water; it’s much more turbulent. That drives strong magnetic fields on the surface of the star. These magnetic fields; our sun has them, but they’re pretty weak. These fields can cause what we call flares, which are these explosions that happen just above the surface. Material can sometimes get ejected outwards. Our sun does this from time to time, and it’s usually not a big concern.
Dr. Regina: That’s how we have the Northern Lights.
Jim: Right, these high energy particles come off the sun and they can hit the earth. When they do, they can cause cool things like the aurora (the Northern Lights), and less cool things.
Dr. Regina: Like the 1859 solar storm.
Jordan: We all remember that one!
Dr. Regina: That’s one of my favorite stories. I’ll let you take it away.
Jim: This was called the Carrington Flare, or the Carrington Event. This was a very large flare that happened on the sun, and they observed it. It was observed, and then 18ish hours later, there were these massive Northern Lights. They were seen as far south as Cuba.
Dr. Regina: And it was so bright that there were campers and they got out of their tents and they thought it was Dawn, but it wasn’t.
Jim: It was wicked bright.
Jordan: It was wicked bright, bro.
Dr. Regina: It was called the Carrington event because it was just him, it was just Carrington looking at the sun spot.
Jim: I think he had an assistant.
Dr. Regina: Did he really? I thought it was just him.
Jordan: Carrington?
Jim: Richard Carrington. He was a British sort of astronomer, like an enthusiastic amateur.
Jordan: A guy with some binoculars?
Jim: Sort of.
Dr. Regina: Well that would have burned his eyeballs out. I think he projected, right?
Jim: He had a projection of the sun, and he would draw the sunspots every day.
Dr. Regina: And this one was monstrous.
Jim: He had been tracking this larger spot when he watched the spot kind of light up and move. In the paper, he says, “And I ran downstairs” to get like Fred, or whoever his assistant was.
Dr. Regina: Fred Weasley.
Jim: Right, exactly. So the Weasley boys run back upstairs and the sunspot has changed, and they weren’t sure what they had observed. This was the first time they’d seen this short-duration brightening event. They’d actually seen the explosion right by the surface of the sun. So, anyways, these things are really neat. They’re a whole area of study by themselves. Trappist, being a small star, has way more than the sun does. So not only are these planets ten times closer to their parent star–
Dr. Regina: They’re getting hit by these flares.
Jim: They’re getting hit constantly by these flares. This star flares like a thousand times more often than the sun, and the flares it produces are probably ten to a hundred times bigger than the flares from the sun. So, this could be a real bad day on Trappist B, or whatever planet you happen to be standing on drinking a mojito when this flare goes off in your face.
These flares can contain ten to a hundred times more x-rays than the flares we see on the sun, so these are really unpleasant events. So much so that continued exposure to these events could actually chip away at the planet’s atmosphere. When we have a flare hit our atmosphere, it just makes it glow and maybe messes with the power grid.
Dr. Regina: And our own magnetic field protects us from the worst of it.
Jim: Right, exactly. If these planets didn’t have any magnetic field, the ultraviolet and x-ray radiation could just strip away the atmosphere in ten thousand or maybe a million years, which on a geological timescale, on a life-forming into complex life time scale, is like the blink of an eye.
Melissa: And that’s exactly what we the happened on Mars. Mars’ atmosphere is super thin, and hardly has any air around it. But we think that Mars was once a place with more Earlike atmosphere. It would have been thicker, thick enough to have liquid water on the surface. We see the scars of rivers and ancient lakes that were there on the surface, so the atmosphere had to be thicker to support liquid water, but there is very little atmosphere now. What happened? We think Mars had a magnetic field that shut off at some point. Then, after Mars’ magnetic field shut off–
Jordan: What!
Melissa: Have you seen The Core?
Jordan: No, but I’m worried about our magnetic field now. It could just shut off!
Dr. Regina: How does it just shut off?
Melissa: We don’t really know.
Dr. Regina: That’s what I thought!
Jordan: We’re all gonna die!
Melissa: Because Mars is a smaller planet than the Earth, it’s possible that the interior has just cooled off faster than the Earth’s. In order to have a magnetic field, you have to have some liquid metal portion on the inner core of the planet, or the interior of the planet. Once that liquid cools down and solidifies, there’s no more inner-dynamo generating that magnetic field.
Dr. Regina: Electrons need to move to generate a magnetic field.
Melissa: Exactly, so your metal needs to be liquid. But, we don’t really know how that process happens. If it cooled off slowly, that magnetic field would have slowly died off, giving all the Martians a heads up that it was happening. Or it could be something that happens much quicker. What we do know is that the Earth’s magnetic field switches polarities every so often, and that seems to happen really fast.
Dr. Regina: It just happened, didn’t it? Or is it gonna happen soon?
Melissa: There’s a lot of talk on the internet that it’s gonna happen and that we’re due, but we really don’t know. We don’t have a good model for what causes these magnetic reversals to happen. And we don’t have a great model for how Mars’ magnetic field shut off, and we don’t have a great model for how the Trappist planets, whether they should have magnetic fields, or whether they did at one time.
Jim: We can imagine that if they did have a super-strong one, they could weather the storms of the flares hitting constantly. Having a super-strong magnetic field, if it could sustain that, maybe life could exist down below there and have the atmosphere be held on.
Melissa: Or, if there’s no magnetic field, and the atmosphere gets stripped away, and the surface of the planet is just getting bombarded with this harsh, solar flare energy, then maybe underneath the surface is a place for life we weather that storm continuously. So, maybe we have to continue our expansion of the habitable zone to be deep down inside planets as well.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? Me thinks she left her underpants
Dr. Regina: Thanks for listening to Spark Science. We are talking about very close exoplanets with Western Washington University astrophysicist Jim Davenport, and NASA’s own geophysicist and Mars rover specialist Melissa Rice.
Do we have an example in our own solar system about having life be just under the surface, other than Europa (possibly)?
Melissa: So, there are several of these large icy moons that might have liquid water oceans underneath.
Dr. Regina: Like Enceladus, right?
Melissa: Enceladus, yeah. Enceladus is spewing water vapor out of it’s south pole, so we know there’s definitely water there. How much of it, how deep it is… Titan is also a place where there is a liquid water ocean. So, Titan has all the craziness we talked about on its surface. There’s the hydrocarbon rain and lakes, and these mountains of rocks made of water ice. But underneath all of that, there’s a liquid ocean under Titan. So, there could be some kind of biosphere deep inside Titan as well.
Jordan: Gonna go fishing on Titan!
Dr. Regina: And Europa.
Melissa: Totally.
Dr. Regina: Mermaids and Mermen.
Jordan: Don’t assume their gender.
Dr. Regina: I know, I shouldn’t. But yeah, so I wanted to bring us back to the solar flares, because I think we’ve talked about this very little in other shows. What would happen if there was the 1859 event to Earth if we had a solar flare of that magnitude? Because in the 1859 event, there were issues with electricity going through telegraph wires, and people were burning their fingers, and people were running the telegraph wires without any power because they were using the solar flare energy. But what would happen now? I love talking about that, because it’s really interesting, and space physicists love it too.
Jim: We call it space weather, because like weather, we don’t know exactly what will happen on more than like a day-ish time scale. We have models, but they aren’t good for more than a day out. You don’t really know what the sun is going to produce and throw at you on any given day. So, it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. In 2012, there was a large flare of probably about the size of the Carrington flare that the Earth missed by about 3 days. Enough of the energy hit several of our satellites so you could see the flare coming by, the wave of high energy particles coming by. It was sort of a static.
Dr. Regina: So you’re saying it went off this way, and then the earth was coming, and like 3 days ago if we had been there, it would have been bad?
Jim: I forget if it was 3 days ahead of us or 3 days behind us in orbit, but yeah, plus or minus 3 days and it would have like smacked right into us. Then, it would have not been a theoretical problem, we would have had a real big problem on our hands. When this event happens, like when the Carrington event hit in the 1850, and there are telegraph wires, these long stretches of metal wires are perfect for we to we call inducing current. This is like a great physics lab where you can take a lightbulb and wave it around power lines. If you go out into where these high energy power lines are, these big transmission lines, it will glow without being plugged in.
Melissa: Are you having an idea?
Jordan: Ding!
Dr. Regina: Nice.
Jim: This is also how like your cordless toothbrush charges: through induction. You’re getting electrons to excite through other wires. So, when this flare hits you get these wires chalk full of electrons. You get a lot of current stuck into these wires all the sudden that they didn’t expect. This can cause a massive power outage. You can imagine the power grid say the entire Western hemisphere being knocked out for, say, a day, which would be an enormous, catastrophic impact. A trillion dollar impact, I think is what the estimates are for just having the power grid completely shut down in like United States, Canada, and part of Europe.
Dr. Regina: And that’s not even talking about the satellites, which would be affected.
Jim: Right. So, potently the GPS satellites, satellites the military uses, the poor astronauts. So, astronauts in the space station are above a bulk of the magnetic field, so they’re getting direct exposure. They’d have to go hid in their little lead room and hope that they are protected enough from that exospore. You would probably ground most air traffic. Boats in the ocean would have to navigate by the stars, just because they wouldn’t have their GPS systems. You can imagine the trickle-down. And worst of all, the television would be off.
Dr. Regina: Worst of all!
Jim: It would be borderline unlivable, at least for a couple days.
Jordan: How are you gonna tweet?
Jim: No way to tweet.
Melissa: Sad.
[All laughing.]
Dr. Regina: References. That’s super interesting. I love that story. I actually tell the Carrington event story whenever I do talks. I’m like, “This is why science is cool.” Electricity and magnetism is a hard subject, even when you’re a physicist. Like, that was not my favorite class. I’m sorry to all my previous professors and my friends who teach it. But, when you talk about an event like that, that really puts it into perspective that like we need to give a crap about this. We need to actually slightly understand electricity and magnetism to be able to prepare for these things.
Jim: That’s right. And we need to like, study our own sun to make sure we understand how, when, and why these things happen. When the Carrington event happened, they had like 12 hours. They didn’t know that the flare and the aurora storm were connected at the time. Now, we do know, and so we’re watching the sun. NASA has space telescopes called like, Solar Dynamics Observatory, which is every 12 seconds, instead of 30 minutes, which is much faster.
Jordan: Improving!
Jim: Every 12 seconds it takes an HD image of the sun.
Jordan: Yeah, you don’t want to look at it too long. I tried for 12 seconds.
Jim: It’s a long time! From that, we’re able to predict things that might hit the earth.
Melissa: So what do we do if we make a prediction? What do we do with the few hours that we have?
Jim: With 12 to 18 hours notice, what you can do is ground flights, turn off essential power grid items that would be damaged–
Dr. Regina: Hospitals.
Jim: Yeah, get things on generators, and get generators ready. They do see these effects in the power grid now. The power companies do monitor large stretches of the power grid for overloads, so there’s a lot they can do to repair the grid if they know this event’s happening. But even so, this is a point that the military, the government, civilian agencies, they all care about. It would be good if we had a better way to communicate what NASA sees to the data that the military needs to prepare for national security concerns, to prepare the department of energy– we need a better way to communicate between these agencies.
Dr. Regina: You were talking about the astronauts getting ready, too. I’ve actually seen videos where they’re like, “Oh, an event’s coming, let’s all get into our…”, so they get ready in the international space station as well. Also, when there’s debris. Apparently there’s debris that orbits around and every once in a while they’re like, “it’s coming again. Everyone get into their module ’cause our space station might be ripped up any second now!”
Jordan: What kind of space stuff we got going around?
Dr. Regina: So there’s space junk.
Jordan: Just junk?
Jim: Just garbage.
Dr. Regina: Yeah. Does anyone know more about this than I do?
Jim: I know some of it is like leftover pieces from rockets and other launch vehicles. It can be like shards of metal, or nuts and bolts, or things like that.
Melissa: Decommissioned satellites.
Dr. Regina: They’ll be things that are broken apart, or whole, and if they’re going fast enough can rip holes through the international space station. So, they have to always prepare in case it does happen to like get out of their areas, get in their space suits, and go and fix it.
Jordan: Sorry, I just had to know!
Dr. Regina: No, it’s really interesting because that movie Gravity, right? I never actually watched the movie, but we talked about it with Dr. Coby. But there’s like all this space debris, and it hits her like continuously. It’s not that common, but it does happen.
I wanted to bring us back though, to wrap this up. We always talk about pop culture, and I guess we were just talking about Gravity.
Jim: I’ve got another one. I’ve got a pop-culture one. This is what I’ve prepared!
Dr. Regina: This is what I always ask my guests: is there a pop culture reference to your work, and is it good or is it bad?
Jim: When the Trappist system was announced earlier in the year, it was almost exactly when the 1977 Star Wars would have reached, if it had been transmitted, Trappist-1. It’s about 39.5 light years away. If Star Wars had been broadcast, and I realize it wasn’t, it was in theaters. But if somebody bootlegged a copy and put it out, it would have reached Trappist this year.
Melissa: Coincidence?
Jim: I don’t know.
Dr. Regina: There’s Tatooines over there! There’s Hoths over there. That’s what you’re telling me.
Jim: That’s right.
Dr. Regina: These are the planets in Star Wars.
Jordan: Oh.
Dr. Regina: I do like a bit of trivia. So, do you want to kind of answer that question? So, how your field is portrayed in pop culture. Books, movies, TV…
Jim: I feel like it’s been portrayed a lot lately, so I think in terms of extrasolar planets, we’ve had a lot of movies lately, like Interstellar. It was a really cool film, but it took some artistic license with its interpretation of planets. I was excited about the black hole that they showed, but I was not as excited about the planet around it.
Dr. Regina: The planet right next to the black hole? Yeah. We do talk about that in another episode.
Jordan: Is that the one that we watched together?
Dr. Regina: Yeah. You can check out our review of Interstellar. But I agree that it was all kind of odd.
Melissa: My problem with all the movies that have some kind of extrasolar planet, or some foreign planet in there, is that they’re rarely creative. And not just in that they all look like southern California.
Dr. Regina: Or Vancouver, BC. There are like two options. Vancouver, BC or LA.
Melissa: My problem is that BC and Southern California are both on one planet. Our Earth is really diverse, right? We have all of these different landscapes available. But, whenever there’s a planet in a movie, it’s always only one landscape, right? Like the Ewoks were on a forest planet. The whole sphere is nothing but forest. The same with interstellar. You know, you have ocean planets, and you have ice planets, and you have forest planets…
Dr. Regina: Or you have city planets, and I’m like “How do they breathe, then?” Where did the oxygen come from?
Melissa: Right. You never have an actual diverse planet. In my work studying Mars, Mars was just thought of for a long time as the basaltic planet. It’s just nothing but lava flows everywhere. Wherever you go on the surface has probably had more or less the same geologic history. It had Lava flows and then it sat there and got busted up for 4 billion years.
But what we’re learning with the rovers on Mars now is that Mars was a really diverse place, and there was water some places, and less in others, and glaciers in some places, and the water was highly acidic like battery acid in some places, but in other places there were lakes full of neutral water that might have been good enough to drink. There were all of these varieties of types of environments that had existed on ancient mars. I’d like to see that reflected in Hollywood. Just some planet with more than one type of landscape on it. Please.
Jordan: To the people!
Dr. Regina: I just instantly thought of Middle Earth, like Mordor and the Shire, and I’m like, “that was just Mars back then.” Sorry, too nerdy!
Jordan: Way too nerdy.
Dr. Regina: So, we’re gonna end with that! I want to thank you for talking with us about planetary geology, and Jim for talking us about how to actually find these exoplanets and flares. It’s been super interesting. So, thank you for coming to talk to us!
Jim: Thanks for having us.
Melissa: Thank you guys.
Dr. Regina: Thank you for joining us. If you missed any of the show, go to our website sparksciencenow.com or kmre.org and click on the podcast link. Spark Science is produced in collaboration with KMRE Spark Radio and Western Washington University. We air weekly on 102.3 FM in Bellingham, or kmre.org streaming on Sundays at 5pm, Thursdays at noon, and Saturdays at 3pm. If there’s a science idea that you’re curious about, send us an email or post a message on our facebook page: Spark Science.
Today’s episode was recorded at the digital media center at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. Our producer is Regina Barber DeGraaff. The engineer for today’s show is Natalie Moore. Production was also done by Darien Brown, Susanne Blaze, and the DMC crew. Our theme music is Chemical Calisthenics by Blackalicious and Wondaland by Janelle Monae.
[? Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]
? Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
? Iodine nitrate activate
? Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
? Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent in
? Careful, careful with those ingredients
? They could explode and blow up if you drop them
? And they hit the ground
[End of podcast.]