Astronomy Cast Ep. 721: Rogue Planets

so if my lighting is bizarre and I'll say this again during the show it's because one of my lighting panels like suicided off of its stand right before I contacted Fraser for it yeah it totally went for it like it's Sommers saled cuz like I'm watching it go I'm like I can't catch that nothing I can do and then all the light goes out and I'm like oh no it died that's going to be so expensive and it had literally somersaulted and landed light facing ground and I picked it up and oh light um but it's now sitting on my desk lighting me from this direction and I have a light coming from that direction which is leading to like what you see on screen I I I personally like a lower like a dimmer lighting setup than a than a very bright one so I think it's perfectly fine I think it sets the mood we're talking about space you're dark you're a you're just a a glimmer of of of what's going on here of Pamela I I normally insights from the darkness yeah I normally worry about the green screen so yeah um so to answer the question um to answer Allen's question yes we are planning a QA I just posted the event so it is now in the system says kicha yeah we're back from Japan how how was your trip oh it was amazing yeah yeah what a what an amazing country so I know you made no plans before you left but what did you end up seeing so we ended up I'm gonna sneeze in a second here it um so we flew into Tokyo and we spent about eight days in Tokyo and then we caught the bullet train to Kyoto and spent three days in Kyoto and then we went down to Osaka and spent three days in Osaka then back to Tokyo for another day or two and then we flew back home and like I feel bad for the Japanese right now because their economy is is has been stalled for 35 years but what that means is that the prices are ludicrously cheap to go to Japan normal guess how much it costs like these are small hotel rooms like like no question the hotel rooms are tiny but but guess how much a hotel room costs for like one person like you know like a single bed hotel room in Tokyo I would expect no less than 150 a night 35 so it was so cheap that I just booked a separate room for my son like I'm just like you know what we get our own rooms so we just booked a room for me room for him yeah and then I and then you could add the oil you can eat breakfast buffet which was like super high like bougie yeah for $9 so it was it was so cheap and I just and I realized that it was just like like there's no minimum as long as you're on Expedia and the and the average reviews are good the hotel rooms are good and so even though you're only spending $35 $40 $50 for a hotel room us the hotel rooms are fantastic they're small but they are fantastic so uh and then the food is cheap too so the best ramen you've ever had in your life for $5 yeah right like it's just it was Bonkers and then you're you feeling snackies you just go into the 7-Eleven and 7-Eleven is there like the small convenience stores are like nothing we have back home they are filled with tons of variety every all the food is incredibly fresh and so you can go get an onigiri which is this little I rice ball filled with yeah some kind of payload can those yeah we did and they are like a dollar right so you just like you go and you like you grab yourself a beverage and an onigiri or two and you spent $3 and now you've got breakfast covered or lunch covered or whatever and so absolutely amazing and then a lot of the the things that we went into were reasonably priced the transportation is amazing just how logical it is and it was weird because like I was in going to Japan I thought okay this is going to be a a challenging place to travel no but it's the exact opposite it was incredibly easy to travel there that all of the you know all the signs are in English all of the devices that you interact with they all have an option to switch over to English um or Mandarin if you want everything you know the everything is said in English and Mandarin and and Korean and Japanese and so uh it was it was it was effortless and and a wonderful place so you know so clean so efficient so uh just the variety of 37 million beings packed into this tiny area you know there's a lot of fun things to do so yeah yeah I I highly recommend it I I'm gonna go back like soon so my other kid wants to go to Italy I'm gonna try to talk them out of it and take them back to Japan so Venice is pretty sweet but uh so one of the things about Japan and I was there in 20 18 I think one of the things that really confused me about Japan is it was a cash economy yes still is yeah that's so weird I was not ready for that you can definitely use your card now in like all of the stores but for like accessing the the rail system yeah the the vending machines it's all still cash and so we were constantly I you know I had a pocket in my backpack where it's just mountains of handfuls of change that you just dump into any machine that'll take it and it sorts through and go here's what I need here's what you've got here's some change you put it back into the bag you just keep you just keep taking your Bago coins and just dumping it into machines and and various good things come out of them so um yeah yeah it's kind of amazing how much of a cash economy it still is that yeah was not prepared for that but that like that the tap works well now the you know a lot of places you just you give them your card they put into their machine you don't even have to put in your PIN code in some cases and it it works so I think they're they're halfway there I'm sure within a couple of years the whole place will be tap and you won't have to think about it anymore yeah yeah so if you're if you're on the fence and you're like oh I don't know if you can get there it is really affordable um and place just absolutely and and it is effortless to travel there which was the biggest surprise to me because I was expecting for it to be you know a foreign language totally different culture everything's really complicated nope piece of cake easy as could be and especially with Google Maps like navigating you onto the the um like the Google Maps navigating you onto which train to take which bars to sit in which exit to look out for as you're leaving the station to get to your next TR it was all yeah yeah the combo of Google Maps plus a really well organized transit system just made navigation eff that is absolutely amazing um yeah yeah the only country I've really had issues in was Greece um yeah and I can handle the alphabet okay but where I was getting disjointed was I was constantly going okay Google Maps is giving me in American character Latin characters and the Greek Transit everything is yeah in Greek characters so is constantly having to to sound things out instead of P pattern match but science prepares you for that right yes yeah you've got you you know you've learned a bunch of your Greek characters yeah yeah all right let's do our jobs all right I am pressing record I have pressed record I am also pressing record and I've also pressed record astronomy cast episode 721 rogue planets welcome to astronomy cast our weekly facts based Journey Through the cosmos where we help you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know I'm profor Kane I'm the publisher of University with me as always is Dr Pamela gay a senior scientist for the planetary Science Institute and the director of cosmic hey pamel how you doing I am doing well although one of my lights took a mighty leap right before we went live so if you're watching this on YouTube thank you for being here and I apologize for my lighting but you how are you after your grand Adventures oh it's great we had an amazing time in Japan uh it's surprisingly affordable uh the travel was effortless the level of English there is incredible um I can't think of anything that went wrong I didn't buy my rail pass in advance and so we had to pay cash for all of the rail that we did we spent a lot of time in of machines punching in destinations and and putting in exact change to be able to go where we wanted to go and it would have been a lot easier just but I think it was we saved money but it was a pain but apart from that the food was amazing people were great uh the the commodation was spotless I I can't recommend traveling and visiting Japan now more highly so so yeah no I I can't wait to go back actually I'm sort of like already I think planning my next adventure back to Japan that all right I need to go check air faires as soon as we're off this stream okay most of the exoplanets that we found are around Stars where they belong but a few have been found free floating in interstellar space the evidence is growing that there are a lot of them out there maybe even more than planets with stars how do they form and how can we learn more about them and we will talk about it in a second but it's time for a break and back so free floating planets rogue planets what are these things they are worlds that by one manner or another managed to not have a star and what's cool is is these isolated planetary Mass objects may sometimes sometimes in just the right circumstances form completely on their own without a star which starts to confuse what a brown dwarf is even more so um or they get ejected from their solar system by one of several different flinging yeeting mechanisms okay well before we get into how they exist let's talk just about like how we found them so how did we first discover the presence of these free floating exoplanets it it turns out that if you look closely you can see them um they were found originally in the Orion planetary nebula all the way back not planetary the Orion star forming region sorry they were originally found in the Orion star forming region back in 2000s if you look very closely crawling across this Rich star forming nebula you will start to see propels of solar systems forming you will see baby Stars of every possible mass and as you go you will actually start to see some things of non-stellar mass and and this is how the very first ones were discovered by two separate teams that published not knowing anything about the other team back in 2000 and like 2000 so we 24 years ago and these are observations made with the Hubble Space Telescope and the thing is that wasn't the only way that they were found they they were also found in the 201 I don't know what we're calling 2011 at this point 2010s um I like 201 it sounds good um there were there was also a group a Japanese group from masaki University that was trying to understand uh how much stuff is out there masquerading is dark matter they were using micr lensing to measure the presence of all of these otherwise non-luminous sources of mass and while they were doing their survey they came across objects just a handful of them that so briefly magnified the light of a star that the only way to explain the magnification was a planet massed object causing the the microlensing event to take place and this is similar to this process of gravitation micr lensing where they're finding exoplanets around a star you get one star passing in front of another star you get this Distortion of the light and then further distortions due to the exoplanets that are following the star as they're passing through and you can actually measure the size and the mass of these of these exoplanets but in the case of the of the rogue planets the free floating planets you're just you're watching a star no star and then suddenly it gets a distortion and then the Distortion goes away very briefly and and and yet all the information that you need is in that Distortion telling you the mass of the planet as it's passing in front and and so this started with the asaki University team led by takashiro sui uh a Polish team picked it up as well and and since then we've just seen team after team we've seen things coming out of oal have gone looking but with microlensing the problem is you see the planet at once and that's it that that's the only chance you've got there's no confirmation taking place yeah yeah it's over yeah it's come as gone but sort of back to that original Hubble Discovery web turned its eye on the same regions in the Orion Nebula and what did it find it it found over 500 free floating worlds of which roughly 9% are binary free floating worlds which is not something anybody predicted not something anyone expected and a recent publication may help us understand how the heck we get there and I have to give a a sh shout out to and I apologize if I mispronounced your names to um McCullen and Pearson for their pair of papers that are working very very very very slowly through peerreview uh the discoverers of these binary objects put out a pair of papers on archive they're working their way through the peerreview system they are not peer reviewed yet but the paper explaining how the non- peer-reviewed results came to be is through Pew so we have a bit of a point of confusion here okay okay you know what I want to leave the listeners on edge to find out how we could have such a thing but it's time for another break and we're back all right so fre floating binary exoplanets how so the thought is we we have to take a step back first and look at one of the mechanisms that allows these free floting planets to exist in the first place so so if you have a tiny solar system or a big solar system it really doesn't matter and it's happily has planets going round and round at Star um and another star comes sweeping past that star that goes sweeping past can gravitationally disrupt your happy little solar system and cause planets to fly away now the catches if you have star with two planets that are on the same side of the star and if when they're on the same side of the star so they're they're gravitationally seeing each other another star comes through it's possible that those two planets that are presumably going in the same direction and that passing Stars gravity can cause those two planets to hold on to each other right and lose hold of both Stars so it's a sideswipe that gravitationally disrupts the system and sends those two planets flying but right and and that's trying to explain I mean like if if all we saw in the irion nebula were these single planets then these side swipes would make a lot of sense and not just like a side but also Planet you know there's a lot of Mayhem that goes on in inside a in a planetary system we know that we had this migration process and so who knows how many planets were kicked out of the solar system early on okay fine but to see 9% of your exoplanets in binary pairs means that something happened to them together that side swipe seems like a bit of a long shot that you're going to get 9% of the time two planets are gently plucked away from their star and sent hurdling off into Interstellar space that's pretty out there it's the only published explanation we have so far but what's the other mechanism right the other idea is that they just formed in place that no star was ever involved right exactly so so yes and this gets back to what is the the core set of ways that you can get these things so rogue planets in general are thought to have either formed that way to have been in a solar system and been yeed out through three body interactions within the solar system so so this is where interacting with some other world plus the star caused them to get ousted or um sideswipes occur so either external Force internal multi-object Dynamics causing yeting or they form externally so it's also possible that you have these things forming independently in binary systems and what gets me is we we only see big things right now we only have the capacity to be seeing these gas giant sized objects we're not yet seeing free floating Rocky objects right and so we don't fully understand what is the frequency that these things occur to different sized objects what is the frequency at which different sized objects can be free floating there's so many things that we don't know what we do know is there's this cool paper that just came out that is saying that you can according to the numerical models get two things gently removed if the side swipe is just right right right but but also there have been papers saying you can get a world that you can get a if you have less gas I mean think about like a dwarf like a a brown DF right you get brown DF you have less material it is able to to uh just for it it doesn't have enough material to form a star but there is enough that comes together that you get this failed star and it might very well be that if you just have a smaller amount of material you get maybe a Jupiter and even less material maybe you get a Saturn but you're you're not going to get the same mixture of heavier elements that you might get in a more traditional star system where you've got this larger gravity well secretion is is pulling material in you got these Rocky areas that are forming certain kinds of planets I think another way to look at it is in a solar system like ours you have massive quantity of mass that has sufficient amounts of the stuff and things that become Rocky worlds that you can have rocky worlds but a single isolated Cloud even if it has the same ratio of materials because the majority of the material is hydrogen and helium you aren't going to get a rock out of a tiny Cloud that is majority hydrogen and helium you're going to get a gas giant that has heavier elements in the same frequency that they occur in our solar system just mixed around differently yeah all right we're GNA take another break and we're back so so now we know these things exist do we have a sense of how many there are out there I love the dispersion in the papers I found so far General suggestion is there's probably at least two per star but there could be tens of thousands yes I know exactly what you're talking about yeah how do you get from so let's imagine right there's there's say there's 100 billion stars in the Mickey way so there could be 200 100 billion rogue planets or maybe 10 trillion rogue planets moving around inside the solar system and and I've got to just stop right now and people are going to go wait a minute could that explain dark matter and the answer is no moving on yeah it's not enough there planets are you know in the solar system rogue planets or planets are 1% of the mass of the solar system it is the it is the Sun that is the is the vast majority of the mass in the solar system so no rogue planets if they if they were Dark Matter then they would be shining and we would see them and we would detect it and they're not 10 times the matter so so sorry um but okay so let's say that there is like even double is exciting right I yeah a thousand times more is incredibly exciting but what does that mean then for H where how far away these things are in the Milky Way so I think this means that we need to start looking more and more for newly discovered comets and asteroids that are on highly elliptical orbits are they alien in nature and I don't mean Little Green Men I mean did they come from other stars yeah I I think if these things do exist in those tens of thousands kinds of numbers we should be seeing a lot more interloping Rocks coming at us from the great beyond and that's cool that's a way to get Rocky samples from a solar nebula that wasn't our solar nibula and I like that idea um it also raises the probability of an interloping Planet coming flying through our solar system I want to see that story very much please and thank you yeah it it ALS stay far away like don't get too close yes yes it also means that when we see these weird Stars Suddenly dimms by x amount um we have new things to potentially blame it means that there's a whole lot of junk out there that we need to figure out how to incorporate into our models and that's cool too it's mostly just a whole lot of this is interesting data if it's only two per star our our models are fine if it's 10,000 by star why haven't they started interloping more and did we just not notice so let's talk about the potential for habitability yeah um could there be life on these planets it depends on how old they are so when they first form they're going to be super hot just everything's super hot when it first forms but over time that internal heat is going to get radiated away over time any radioactive materials in the mix are going to do their radioactive Half-Life thing and stop being radioactive and start being completely different child particles over time all of these things are going to just cool off to little Frozen nuggets floating through the Galaxy and Beyond it's hard to have life without energy but but we think about places like Jupiter with its icy moons and you know the the heat for Io like IO is the most molten place in the solar system and it is not coming right and so could you get the situation where you've got a giant exoplanet and moons that are tidally interacting and are being kept warm in the same way that Europa yes Enceladus and so on yeah yes so then it starts to be now we're looking at the case of life with no light and there's no reason to think that can't happen because we have it at Deep see uh hydrothermal vents here on the planet Earth yes if we manage to form rogue planets that take their moons with them or form with moons and those moons have the needed constituent materials so here we're looking at these minuscule clouds somehow having enough Rock and water to form icy moons or to have stolen them when they got yeed from where they came um yes there is the potential now comes the question of is this the kind of environment and we don't know yet capable of sustaining life and and you've also got the the decay of radioactive elements which are a big part of the Earth's internal heat and so you kind of add those together and there's a chance yeah but good luck learning anything about them because they're they're far and there's no star to eliminate them so really this is my next question is how can we learn more what can we do to find these things with more precision and learn more about them the the frustration is like we know that the area of the Orion and the trapezium star forming rions clusters are super super dense and in that super super dense environment we're going to find the rare objects but once they leave we're now looking for cooling objects and jbst is going to be part of our ability to do that but we're just going to have to hope that some of these objects are interloping in the fields we're already looking at directed searches for them jwst isn't a survey scope I think our best hope is maybe we're looking at other background objects within the plain of the Milky Way for some reason and there happens to be one in field and that's what we're going to be looking for is looking at other objects within the Milky Way what's going on and there is a telescope that's coming that's going to be doing exactly this this is the Roman Space Telescope um Nancy Chris Roman and it it's larger goal is to be do this gigantic survey of the universe to try and map out the concentrations of Dark Matter dark energy and you know understand the expansion rate of the universe but it has this incredibly wide field of view it's looking for objects to change in brightness across this field of view and it's theorized that it will find thousands maybe tens of thousands of rogue planets through those microlensing events that you mentioned earlier on so we are going to have an A a telescope that is going to find a lot of them but the pro and give you these overall you know give us a number of how many of there are out there give us a sense of their of their Mass how how massive are they but it's still one and done they they pass through in front of the star and then they're gone and there no more observation allowed but Roman is working in the infrared so it also has a potential to do direct Imaging of young ones and we're going to have Roman at the same time that we have ver Rubin and with the lsst doing its survey thing across the sky in the best of all possible worlds we happen to catch some of these microlensing events with both scopes at the same time and get that confirmation yeah um more I think Roman I mean I'm really hoping Roman does some direct Imaging um and then Reuben is going to be catching everything it's just that simple Reuben is going to be catching everything yeah and you know there was a mission out wa a few years ago called wise and it was doing a infrared survey of the area around the the solar system um in fact we know that there are no large planets in the outer solar system like no Jupiter sized World out to about 10,000 astronomical un uh units because of the the the survey that was done by the wise telescope but it also found Brown dwarfs things like that so I mean you know we know that if planet nine exists out there it has to be roughly like between Earth and say Neptune size like it can't be bigger because that's been ruled out but there could very well be one of these Rogue worlds you know if they if they really are that dense as as we're saying that they're going to be within tens of thousands of aus of the sun like they're out there around us all around us how how does this sort of change your thoughts about about exploring the milkway say we get to some Far Future where we're able to fly to another star system are these the destinations not the Stars so I mean it depends on what you're going for at the end of the day there is the possibility that you get on one of these that has a particularly High Velocity so that you can cover a larger swath of the Galaxy in a given number of generations but if you're looking at a world that is either just a frozen gas giant or a frozen gas giant with perhaps some warmed up moons around it that require massive amounts of drilling equipment to get down to any liquid water that's not the most energy efficient destination you could go towards um I think that the idea of flying out to your your proximus Cent Tores as starting points is going to for the time being remain our ultimate short-term destination um I do however really like the idea of of taking the idea of Jules Verns off on a comet and turning it into off on a planet and setting up a future where this is how we explore the Galaxy yeah yeah I I love this idea that these rogue planets are all around us they're passing relatively close to the solar system what would have been a Thousand-Year Journey suddenly becomes 100-year Journey that these could potentially be refueling stops that or even if we map them out well enough that they are gravitational slingshot points that you can use to accelerate your spacecraft to its final destination um but it it just it changes I don't know when I started to learn more about these rogue planets it started to feel what like that Revelation that you realize that you're more bacteria than you are person you know that that the that the the Galaxy is more rogue planets than regular planets we just don't see them because because we only can see what's in around the Stars again maybe it might be superstar sure yeah merely two perar or might be more it might be less who knows like we got we've got to wait for Roman to do it survey to really tell us the answer but but it still sets my imagination on fire I just think it's such a great idea and I would love to know more and hopefully future missions telescopes will know more we eventually yeah the imagine if a Mercury just suddenly flew through like Rogue Mercury coming for a visit from another star I'd be down for that yeah that would be amazing awesome all right thanks Pamela thank you Fraser and thank you I have so many names to get through this week I'm not quite sure how we landed here but I'm very grateful um I'm going to read out the names of a whole bunch of $5 of sorry $10 in up patrons thank you so much for being part of our community you allow us to have our sta staff take care of us as well as they do this week I'd like to thank Sergio sevo Brett Mormon uh Conrad haling Thomas gazetta Jarvis Earl tusher Nini slug bbop apocalypse Bruno lets Greg Davis Bob CR will Hamilton Sterling gray Adam W seon tusen Bert Vice gear Daly Jeff lickman uh Rick norval Amber J Bor Morin B Sven barter Douglas Bill hedge Douglas mclin Amy Neil Beaton uh David kilia Max habberman Paul lvll viven rosz Eric gothier fman Susan busini Tom Rosland Richard Bloom meh mcmurder uh Michael fredman Sandy Jester Chris Affleck Dania uh dasel cth Ambrose Simon Bennett uh yorg tarev Roy KJ Craig Fisher Kevin milel David Johnston and Brian Hagar thank you all so very much thanks everyone and we'll see you next week byebye and then they saved I lost the window there's the window I buried the window um and this time I'm going to remember to put it in the correct directory so that I don't force Rich to go splunking for it yeah you get the email from Rich yeah where's your audio don't know I'm upload everything is safed we are safe all right Hal mckin asks um could a roog planet have enough internal temperature to support life without a son I feel like we covered that there was one thing that I think you're not aware of and so I didn't want to sort of put your put you into unfamiliar territory thank you so I interviewed Ravi cman the the guy who's behind the heyen worlds uhhuh and one of the things that he said was the Heen worlds because you've got these these exoplanets with a thick layer of liquid water and a thick hydrogen atmosphere you get dramatically different requirements for where the habitable zone occurs and he feels that with enough um radioactive elements in the in inside the planet that it could remain liquid water on the surface for billions of years and so some so not you've got the Heen worlds that are in orbit around stars but some of them could be free floating Heen worlds and they could actually have liquid water on their surface under a thick atmosphere of Hy that is cool and you're always welcome to bring up I interviewed this guy I interviewed the guy behind the H world and I asked him this exact question so yeah I thought that was cool very um and then H mckin also asked uh how fast do Interstellar traveling objects like rogue planets travel compared to our fastest spacecraft should we have probes on standby to piggyback on such objects we can't catch up so well so you're I disagree um if they through our solar system we can catch yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so so the one thing is to intercept them and do a flyby and actually the European Space Agency is planning a mission called the interstellar Interceptor yeah and this is a tiny probe that's going to fly with the aerial spacecraft in 2028 so just in four years um and it will hover at the L2 lrange point and wait for a Target and the potential targets are an Interstellar object like umu or borov or a long period commment that's going to fall into the inner solar system and then fire its thrusters and go for it and try to do a flyby and take some pictures of the first object ever seen that came from outside the solar system uh the other thing is there's a group called project Lyra I don't I don't know if youve seen there so so they are every year updating their here's how we could catch UA mua if we really wanted to and then they they describe the rocket that's NE a falcon heavy could do it with a very tiny spacecraft now amumu has gotten far enough away that you need to do an oerth maneuver you have to fly really close to the Sun and pick up some velocity to be able to to meet but still we could build a a probe today and launch it and catch muua in about 30 years if we wanted to nobody wants a bit controversial there are other folks that like no that's actually not feasible given the time it takes to build something so the cat is how long does it take something to be built how long does it take to catch up if you combine both those numbers do you get there in the amount of time you have after it's been discovered yeah so they they they say yes and they keep sort of updating their you know every every cou six months or so we get a new project Lyra update where they give the newest flavor of their proposal but but nobody really is willing to drop everything build a probe put it on a on a spacecraft and send it so yeah so I think their work is becoming more and more useful for considering what it'll take to to go to the next Interstellar object right right and then Hal mckin also asks would a road Planet more typically be traveling away from the Milky Ways Galactic core say that an opinion on that would a rogue Planet be traveling away from the core of the Galaxy I mean on average things are moving round and round not on highly elliptical orbits so uh on on average they're going to be coming at us or we're going to be catching up to them in the direction of motion around the Milky Way yeah yeah so they're just going to do star things yeah ESO says my TV doesn't get the change channel signal if the armchair is in the way how am I supposed to believe that we're still talking to the Voyager way the heck out there does your remote control have a 70 meter radio dish attach right that's that's the key yeah does it if it does and most remotes problem most remotes are using infrared as well and and your armchair can block the infrared your your significant other including your pets uh can block the infrared but the radio signals can pass through stuff yeah through the atmosphere yeah and and so the voyager's dish I forget the exact size of the dish but it's several meters across and then it's transmitting and then the dish that's that's retrieving it is 70 M across and they're only picking up a few bits per second it is not a lot of bandwidth that they're getting because it's so far away have have you had a chance to check on the status of beo Columbo today not today it was sad last I looked yeah yeah it's the last I saw that is that it was sad they've restored 90% of the thrust and they're going to make their next flyby okay so they should make it to Mercury they're going to make they've got three flybys to do yeah so they're going to do they're going to perform their next one no problem I don't know the status of the two after that okay and then this it's temporary this is this is the uh the transfer module and it's going to get ditched when they get to um when they get to to Mercury and then the two spacecraft will be on their own so um yeah they're going to have to try and get through that uh so asks how is Voyer still powered my batteries don't last that long again does your remote control have a decaying piece pellet of plutonium 238 that is that has a half life of uh 50 years in your remote control because if it does then your battery should still work but if it doesn't might be that your your your batteries are powered differently than than the Voyager spacecraft and to the people commenting on my necklace it's actually one that I made um and there's stuff similar to it I don't think there's anything this big currently for sale but there's stuff similar to it for sale on my Etsy store so uh star strider Studios on Etsy and then Hal mckin asks if I did any sciency things in Japan um not really you know this was a vacation and a chance to hang out in Japan with my son and so I purposefully tried not to do any work while I was there um we went to a science museum which was kind of mediocre I wish I wish I hadn't gone there yeah yeah it was too bad it was very yeah it wasn't great big beautiful amazing amazing space there was a really cool uh Earth which which had all of the weather on Earth projected onto it and it was sence on the sphere yeah yeah on the sphere and it was huge it was like I don't know like the size of my room and so it was this giant sphere and you could walk around at this cool uh sort of walkway that went all the way around circular but the actual exhibits inside the museum were were they were not great we weren't really impressed um and and there was another science museum that we tried to go into but we arrived too early and they weren't open and we weren't patient so we just kept moving um so that's it really I didn't do I mean I would I would have loved to have gone out to the to the actual Science Center sorry to the Space Center and you know if it was just me I would have been setting up interviews and you know touring facilities and meeting scientists and so on but so much my yeah yeah my son wanted to see anime stuff giant fighting robots Sushi and so on so yeah um ESO asks what is the space question that you wish someone would ask you Pamela I have the same answer what book would you like to see from the most recent science and and I will write it is what I want them to say after I answered the question I I've decided I need to start a running list on my blog of please somebody write these these science topics into a novel because I want to see them used like a like like a science fiction book that incorporates give me some examples what are some cool ideas that you would this Rogue planic idea I mean imagine our solar system flying happily through the UN and then it is spotted that there is a runaway star that's going to make a close en encounter with our solar system at such an angle that it strips off like us and Mars or something um I would love to see the multigenerational Space Opera that that comes of that yeah I I mean there have definitely been some some books that have been done about generation ships and you know my perspective on a Generation ship I mean Fallout kind of covers it yeah yeah like when you think about the Fallout universe and the various kinds of experiments that happen in the different Fallout shelters that's essentially a Generation ship or uh The Silo yeah right it's the same thing and so trapping human beings in that case it's for survival and so I think there's an expectation like be glad you're alive but but once you are having people go to another star system that this is a thing that your parents volunteered for this this human rights viol this ongoing human rights violation that you are trapped inside was chosen by your parents and um and I think I find that really fascinating horrifying I apologize for the jingle bells in the background I have murder dog just walked into the room right I so I think of a Generation ship as a human rights violation and not as an inspiring story about people going to you know another star system no you were born you're what is my purpose your burp your purpose is to be born to struggle for survival in a creaking Starship that is losing functionality to maintain it long enough to have children so that they can carry over for you and then your job is to die welcome to the universe there there's an interesting take on that in some of the Alistair Reynolds books where there is a small Cadre of humans that are kept awake while the majority of the humans on board the spacecraft are kept with their permission in cryogenesis and in those cases it's like you were born into a cult as that van said that van puts it but it is the cult of the keeping everyone else alive and and it's just sort of like that sideways of slavery but still slavery I don't know what to think there I'm I'm reading uh House of the sun right now by eler Reynold so I'm not sure which one you're talking about but but don't spoil I won't yeah um Bob Blanc says go four leg Starship Earth Yep here we go um so anything other we're not streaming on Twitch right no no I don't know why but no we're not yeah so Bob blank asks um any aable siiz telescope Observatory to be built anytime soon plan 300 meter dish no fast over in China is all we've got for a while which has a 500 meter dish so it's bigger it's bigger and and they are building the world's largest steerable radio telescope so that should be coming online in a couple of years yeah um the the the folks behind like the National Science Foundation they're building an advanced version of the very large array which which is going to span pretty much all of North America so it's going to be hundreds of radio dishes from Canada through the us into Mexico and will be just dramatically more powerful than the very larg Ray the Next Generation very large array and then of course there is the U the square kilometer array yeah that that one these things take decades and Multinational agreements yeah yeah and so I think that's part of it is that people said we could rebuild AO but you've got fast which is big and you know the Chinese are are bringing International collaborations people can do their research on that telescope and then you've got the Next Generation very large array and the square kilometer array which will push into dramatically different wavelengths so um it's kind of like cancelling Sophia yeah like James web does everything Sophia could do there's still sadness involved because everything is over subscribed and it was thiswe little instrument yeah but but it is a is able to do a fraction of the signs he it can look at the Moon which is a thing that James web can never do yeah so yeah um what's coming up next what are you working on uh right now I'm getting ready to go to Baltimore to balticon I will be there this Friday Saturday Sunday Monday um I'm then going down to Orlando to meet with a colleague down there and I will be doing a meet up there as well um I will be sending out all the details on patreon and and posting them on social media um and one of the things that we're also getting ready to do is a cleanup of the astronomy cast website uh anyone who's looked recently we just put like 20 new transcripts up uh big things are starting to happen um if you're not supporting us on Patron you're not getting notified of what all is going to happen and I'm looking for ways to really engage our patreon community more so let me know if you have ideas everyone so I have an idea for you which is that you don't actually have to become a patron to follow us on patreon there's a free version of patreon and so one of the things that a lot of people do is you just go on to patreon follow us and you'll get notifications about a lot of stuff that we do a lot of the stuff that's that we release for free you'll get that content and then you'll also see the stuff that's only being available to the patrons from there free and and so on but if you just want like it's been described as a nice bookmark yeah if you want to way to bookmark what a Creator is doing that is really interesting definitely check out our patreon so patreon.com astronomy cast yeah I'm typing it into the chat all right well I think we've reached the end of our hour uh it is time to roll so thank you everybody for hanging out today it's great to be back and doing astronomy cast and then remember we've got another seven episodes no it's less it's it's it's we're taking next Monday off because it's Memorial Day yeah um and that leaves us for more episodes we have four more episodes so uh thank you everybody thanks pan thanks in advance to the editors are gonna have to deal with this nonsense and we will see all of you in two weeks byebye everyone