Odyssey

Or the effect caused by the transition from an industrial to an information age. I'm Ray Suarez joined us for a conversation with Francis Fukuyama on the next TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. That's today at 1:00 o'clock and. Just for this week Chicago is the center of the universe as astronomers from all over converge here today on Odyssey Doug Duncan will be along with astronomers Geoff Marcy and Allen Dressler to talk about what the universe is like. There are some newly discovered real estate out there. We'll talk about what it is and where and what it means. And we'll hear about how galaxies are formed and what their formation has to tell us. That's today on Odyssey. Next after the news from NPR here on Chicago.

From National Public Radio News in Washington I'm core of a Coleman diplomatic action over Kosovo is the topic of the day in Belgium. But today pilots bombarded Yugoslavia for the 70th straight day. NPR's Julie McCarthy reports from Brussels as Belgrade plunged into darkness overnight. They dose as it pounded Yugoslav army barracks knocking out more artillery and tanks with allies pushing Belgrade from the air. Diplomats resume talks in Bonn. Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin meets Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and EU emissary Martti Ahtisaari. The U.S. is seeking clarification on what Belgrade means when it says it excepts a peace plan devised by Russia and the G7. There is reportedly an effort underway in Belgrade to foster the impression that peace is in sight. There are also indications that Belgrade is not prepared to accept

NATO's demand that it form the core of a post-conflict peacekeeping force. Whether Belgrade is posturing or is serious is the question diplomats in Bonn are hoping to have answered today. This is Julie McCarthy NPR News Brussels. Going Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met incoming Prime Minister Abe who had Barak today in Jerusalem. Both leaders discussed the upcoming change of power Barak defeated Netanyahu and closely watched elections last month. Barak says he wants to renew peace negotiations with Palestinians and he says he will include other parties in his new government who favor more Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory. Firefighters in the south say unless they see significant rain a huge wildfire will burn there unchecked. Authorities believe it could take up to two weeks to contain a blaze that has consumed thousands of acres of the O'Keefe an Okie swamp along the Florida Georgia state line. Hoskins in the Peach State Public Radio reports.

Hundreds of firefighters some from as far away as Alaska are working around the clock battling the wildfire that authorities say was started by lightning 10 days ago as a really this morning only about a fifth of the fire had been contained. Firefighters describe a number of close calls including barely making it over burning bridges that were the only way in and out of some areas. And then there have been the close encounters with poisonous snakes trying to escape the flames. Monday smoke from the fire closed a portion of Florida Highway 2 for the fifth straight day and threaten the small communities of Deep Creek and council Georgia. Last year fires that began over the Memorial Day weekend burn nearly 500000 acres forcing 100000 people to evacuate the area and causing 400 million dollars in damages. For NPR News I'm sit Hoskyns in Atlanta. On Wall Street the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 107 points at ten thousand four hundred fifty one. Trading is light today. The Nasdaq composite index is down 43 points at twenty four twenty seven. This is

NPR in NPR's business update after taking Memorial Day off Wall Street began its week with a bank deal and a slew of new economic data to check. NPR's Jack Speer reports a stronger than expected report from the nation's purchasing managers is just the latest news to influence inflation fears but it was enough to send Wall Street investors running for cover yet again today. The National Association of Purchasing Management reported dates may index rose 2.4 points bigger than expected increase seen as a sign the economy's continuing to grow perhaps at such a rapid pace the Federal Reserve Board might have to hike interest rates to cool things down. So there were signs today maybe the economy is not spiraling out of control construction spending in April took its biggest tumble in more than five years falling 2.4 percent. The Conference Board also reported its index of leading economic indicators fell a tenth of a percent while the mergers and acquisitions front am south Bancorp announced today it is buying first American in a 6.3 billion dollar stock deal. Jack Speer NPR News Washington.

Four major airlines have increased their fares. Continental American Northwest and U.S. air all raised prices today for the third time this year. This is an 11 percent increase in fares so far this year. Continental says the increase is necessary because it is carrying full plane loads of passengers box office receipts are in surprise. The Phantom Menace the latest installment of the Star Wars series kept its leading place. It earned about sixty four point eight million dollars over the Memorial Day weekend. But the movie has already grossed 200 million dollars in just 13 days. The movie Independence Day took one month to do the same. In second place this weekend Notting Hill. I'm CORBA Coleman NPR in Washington. Support for NPR comes from Borders Books and Music where browsing is a fine art. More than 240 locations across the country and online at w w w dot borders dot com. Good morning and welcome to WBEZ Chicago ninety one point five

FM. I'm Gretchen how French astronomers by the score are descending upon Chicago have descended upon Chicago for a big old astronomy meeting that Doug Duncan is going to tell us all about he's here today and he's brought some friends with him to talk to us about our universe. I have indeed Gretchen. And it's nice to be here. We have astronomers actually from many different countries all over the United States and we're covering literally every topic in the universe there that don't know of that we know so far a good point and topics all the way from the edge of the universe cosmology how the universe began all the way to relatively close by things like planets and as we'll tell our listeners not only are the astronomers here to listen to each other but tonight at 7 o'clock there is a big open public talk and we're expecting over a thousand people from Chicago we have room for several thousand It's FREE.

And people should come on down and if you'd like to introduce our guests including tonight's SPEAKER Well tonight's speakers Allen Dressler who is an astronomer from the Carnegie observatories and one of the founders of the NASA's Origins Program. Welcome to the program thanks so much for coming in. Thank you very much. We're also joined by Geoff Marcy who is professor of astronomy at San Francisco State University and today will be playing the role of the planet guy. So we'll be telling us about some nearby things going on. Some new what we're calling new real estate out there in the universe but. Allen Dressler Let's start with you your talk tonight is about origins. That's your your thing. So tell us what should I be talking about. I'm going to be talking about NASA's missions that are aimed at telling the whole story of how we got here all the steps that happen from the Big Bang that led to the possibility of planets and. Life on those planets and eventually creatures like us that could look back and try to figure out how the whole thing came about and let's let's jump into the middle of that story because one of the things that you are particularly focused on in your work is the formation

of galaxies. I sort of I don't know in-between structure in the universe. Well that's a good way to put it galaxies are that really where the story begins for us you can go all the way back to the Big Bang but it is the formation of galaxies that sort of starts us on the road to us. And before that the universe could have a lot of different outcomes that wouldn't be included. Life I think on planets but once galaxies were formed it was pretty much assured that that was what was going to happen. Galaxies are big star systems we live in one. When you look up in the night sky and you see many stars you are seeing stars that are all bound together by gravity into one gigantic system. And that system goes out a certain size it's like a hundred thousand light years across a big big system. And then there's empty space in there some other galaxies in fact there are billions of other galaxies separated by vast amounts of space and that whole system together comprise what we call the universe the known universe and it's all expanding as if there were some gigantic explosion about 12 billion years ago.

How do you pull that sort of sounds like what the the same things that go on in forming solar systems but that's because I don't really understand the difference Doug. Right. Well you're right some details gravity is playing a role in both things. First thing that happened in the universe was very small differences in the density of matter from place to place because these big systems of galaxies to become sort of separate from each other and then within those galaxies gravity again gathered the material to make individual stars. If you think back toward the very early moments of the universe when it was had not expanded very much when the universe was all crunched together very tightly. That was a time when the universe was very hot. And it was way too hot for any of the structure the physical structures people would recognize now to form. So you know you think sort of a primordial soup lots of matter very hot but nothing permanent nothing material forming. And as a matter of fact it couldn't have been until well minutes after the

Big Bang was when some of the elements started to form as we've talked about before on the show. But then you're talking hundreds of thousands of years than millions of years before recognisable structures which as Alan said would become the galaxies start to form and that that's really a very interesting topic right now because until very recently we haven't had too much evidence about how that happens. Isn't that fair. It's been hard to guess from what galaxies look like today what happened when they were forming say a billion years after the Big Bang. But with the Hubble Space Telescope and these new space telescopes I'll be talking about tonight. You can actually look far enough away in the universe that you're looking back in time to the very time when galaxies were forming. Now OK so so where in this galaxy and it's a hundred Milky Way by Milky Way. We went away and it's a hundred thousand light years across. And is it how do you how do you sort of know where the edges of it are. I mean are all the stars that are our objects that are in this galaxy acting in a certain way is does it have a clearly defined edge and then

there's a space that's definitely not our galaxy. Well you can tell best by looking at other galaxies to see their shape since we're right in the middle of this when it's a little bit difficult to study but it's a big disk system and most of the stars are going around in big circles around the center. But if you sort of map it out you can find that there is a more or less an edge where it begins to drop off very suddenly. I wanted to return to the point I was this should have been the beginning of why galaxies are that crucial step on the way to life. It has to do with what is probably the most exciting and important discovery of this century in astronomy and that is that all the heavy elements carbon and nitrogen oxygen iron all the things that our world is made of and that we're made of like the calcium in our bones come from the centers of stars. They weren't around at the beginning of the universe and stars make those heavy elements in the process of nuclear fusion. So you need to build up those heavy elements before you can make an Earth or you know any kind of life forms. And it took generations of stars in order to

get the abundance of these heavy elements high enough that we could build planets. And that's what I always think you mean stars forming and dying and that's right and when stars die they spatter the heavy elements back into space and it recollects them makes new stars so generations are born. Each time the percentage of the heavy elements increases until you have enough to make a planet like Earth and this has been one of the great successes of astronomy over the past couple of decades because not only have we worked out the theory as Alan says but we've got lots of evidence that shows that is true and one of the easiest pieces of evidence is as he said if you trace back the expansion of the universe the whole thing started about 12 billion years ago thanks to the Hubble telescope and a lot of work. We now know that with quite a bit of accuracy but the age of the earth is only four and a half billion years old. So you've got a 12 billion year old universe you've got a four or five billion year old set of sun and planets. You had plenty of time for a previous generation of stars to live make the elements explode in a supernova. Dog I blast them out into space

and then gravity recollected them in our Sun is a second generation star or their main or third or fourth. We're made up of stardust. In fact if you probe the very edges of our galaxy you can find the oldest stars sort of fossil stars that date back to the very beginning of the galaxy and they don't have the common elements in them they don't have carbon and silicon and nitrogen the stuff that's in us. So that this part of the story really hangs together very well. Well OK. I have a few questions. OK. Explain again maybe you already said this and I didn't catch it. Why do stars need galaxies in order to form could stars form just out there are they have to be in a galaxy. Well it is a matter fact I that was sort of where I was going with that. If we had a first generation of stars which could have formed say a billion years after this all got started but there weren't galaxies to hold them all together. Then those elements would have just dispersed through space and we would never have gotten higher element abundances So what the galaxies did was basically provide a storehouse of that material so that it stayed together and therefore

got more and more and rich with each generation of stars to the point where it could build up to where it is today. And I really believe and I think most people agree with me that if there hadn't been those big structures and galaxies had just dispersed and come apart we wouldn't be here. Here's my other question. Do galaxies have a life cycle or are galaxies born and do they die are we in a first generation galaxy or. That's a good question. Stars we know do have life cycles I mean the sun is sort of halfway through its life it's about five billion years old. Some stars live a very short time some ways Doug says which were formed at the beginning of the universe are still in middle aged whole galaxies. They all seem to have formed relatively early within the first billion years of the. Big since the Big Bang and in the sense that they're still together and that the sense that they're still forming stars or still have stars that are shining. They don't die I guess in the the imponderable future galaxies will go dark when eventually all the stars burn out. In that

sense you could say they they would have died although all the matter will still be there it just won't be shining anymore although they don't die. Would you expect that galaxies would change their appearance significantly as they age. That's for sure we can already tell that galaxies which are continuing to form stars have a sort of a spiral pattern and they have a lot of gas and dusty material floating around in them and once they're used up all that material the four new stars and some of them have stopped forming these stars they become a more sort of dull looking like big balls of stars and that's going to happen I think eventually to all these galaxies. But that's a long way off. You know there's a subject called galactic cannibalism where galaxies eat. Nearby galaxies how common is that. Well it has been very common in the past because galaxies were closer together in the past because the universe was still expanding and probably in the future it's going to get less and less common because things are going to get more and more spread out. What does it mean to cannibalize another galaxy just to grabble its stars into your system. Yeah he's right I mean that's that's a simple way to think of it when two

galaxies come close to each other. They're still there and stars are still so far far apart it's kind of hard to imagine this but Star galaxies are mostly empty space so when two galaxies come together they can pass right through each other without any of the stars colliding but they exert a sort of strong gravity on each other and distort each other until they wind up as one new system. And if it's a big galaxy eating up a smaller one it just incorporates the little galaxy into itself. Some of the amazing Hubble pictures of these really. Extreme looking galaxies are galaxies that are distorted by two galaxies coming near each other. Now our galaxy has a black hole at its center is that right. Yes we think so we think so that evidence now is it. Is that true for other galaxies is that sort of standard. Yes in fact other galaxies were were more or less discovered first because it's hard again to look at the center of our galaxy because we're right in in it. But their nearest neighbor galaxy has a black hole which is ten times bigger more massive than the one in our

galaxy. It looks like all galaxies that have this big spherical bulge of stars in the middle have a black hole that goes with it. And that probably tells us something about how the galaxy formed its sort of initial core formation back at the very beginning. And is it that the mass and the gravity from that black hole that that is holding everything together. No as a matter of fact only a small part of the mass is in that black hole in the center about 1 percent and when you're far away from it that 1 percent doesn't look any different if it were in stars or a black hole it doesn't exert any more force than one percent of stars would. So unless you happen to be unfortunate enough to drift into the black. Which creates all kinds of fireworks. You never know it's there. All right. We need to shift gears a little bit because we also have Geoff Marcy who's been sitting there very patiently listening all about galaxies. But he's going to tell us a little bit about planets and new planets so we're sort of working our way down the structural scale now we've got in some galaxies we've got some stars for a long time as far as we knew our star was the only one that had that had planets

but nope that's not true. And in fact lots of stars have planets and maybe lots of stars have lots of planets. So Jeff Mars you want to tell us about that. Well that's really quite a remarkable development of course our own solar system consists of our sun in the center and then the nine planets that we all learn about in elementary school. The gargantuan planet in our system is Jupiter the most exquisitely Gorgeous of the planets in our solar system is Saturn and of course the most heartwarming of the nine planets is the earth and it's heart warming in a in a literal sense as well as metaphorical in that the Earth is a special planet and we know it is because it has water not in frozen ice form not in gashes steam but in liquid form. And of course it's the liquid water that is the stuff of life without water. Obviously we humans couldn't exist and life itself probably wouldn't have even started up here. And so the real question that arose well literally 2000 years ago when the Greeks posed this question was whether or not the twinkling lights that we see in the

sky at night. Also Harbor planets something like the nine planets that we have orbiting our own sun. And for those two thousand years we did not have an answer as to whether or not there were planets orbiting other stars and now we do. Well we have some preliminary evidence that looks frankly very strong. We've discovered now 20 different planets orbiting other stars. And they come in all shapes and sizes we've been shocked frankly at the characteristics of those planets the orbits of some of these planets are not circular like the circular orbits that we have here in our own solar system some of these orbits we've found are quite oval shaped In fact most looking at the comet orbit like Comet orbits the planets we're finding many of them swooping close to their host star and then dodge back out into the hinterlands of their planetary system and then swoop back in again unlike the circular orbits we have here. Some of the planets we're finding are even bigger than our own gargantuan Jupiter. Some of the planets that we're finding around other stars orbit extraordinarily

close to their host star closer than our own Mercury the closest in our system orbits the sun. And so we're finding out that our own planetary system that's beloved by us is in fact one special case of a whole zoo of planetary systems and we're just one beast in that zoo. What is the difference. Theoretically or intellectually what is the difference between finding that a star has a planet circling around it and finding that a star has two or three planets circling around it. Well it's remarkable in the sense that our own sun of course has nine planets and so we sort of anthropocentric really imagine that other planetary systems should also have multiple planets not just one planet it is anthropocentric it could well be that there are stars that simply have one planet orbiting them and that's the end of it. But we're interested of course in finding planetary systems that remind us a little bit of home. And so it's delightful to find another star that has not just one but a handful of planets

orbiting it. It's also true that the planets that Jeff has been pioneering in finding are big planets and if you finds multiple planets and increases the chances there might be some small worlds like Earth where there's water and such. Now is it I it's my understanding that the big planets that you're finding planets there might be small planets there but they're too small to detect or not. No that's quite right we're just scratching the surface. Technically we're able to find the biggest planets right now the Jupiter is in the Saturn's. But we don't have the technology yet to discover planets that are smaller than our own Jupiter and Saturn and frankly one of the most exciting developments that will occur in the next decade is the advent of new instruments telescopes many of them space borne that NASA's going to build it's extraordinarily exciting and these new space borne telescopes super Hubble's if you will and sometimes multiple hobbles will actually enable us to take pictures of planets around other stars and even more importantly smaller planets hopefully Earth like planets

to put this in context just so that people appreciate what a tough job this is. If you were to make a scale model of say our solar system take I don't know take a take a beach ball or basketball or something. Now that's the sun. OK right here at the studio on Navy Pier. Then you can take a ping pong ball maybe to be Jupiter and you can take a grain of rice to be the earth. And you can scatter them here and there in rooms of the studio at a Navy Pier. You want to take a guess where the next star the closest star besides the sun would be with its own little ping pong ball. Whenever you give me questions like this the answer is always Denver. So I want to thank you. I did as I was going to write I was going to say Los Angeles OK depending on which story because it's not it's not like so yeah that's right you know I wanted to say something that the listeners might be interested in why if we can see all the way across the universe it's been so hard to find planets

around stars that are relatively close by and the reason is that even though planets are very small the real problem is that the stars they're around are so bright that they block out our attempt it's just like having a searchlight focused in your eyes and somebody like you're trying to look at the guy who just light a match right next to it you're not going to see the match you're going to be blinded by the searchlight. And Jeff and his colleagues have pioneered this way of looking for the motion of the sun of the star in question that shows that there are planets around it. The next step we want to be able to take is to figure out a way to blot out the light of the star so we can see these planets actually circling the distant stars. So Geoff Marcy if for example you were an astronomer on one of those planets and you were looking at our solar system you'd probably have counted two planets by now. That's exactly right if we were astronomers on Alpha Centuri looking back toward our earth we would be able to detect Jupiter and barely detect our own Saturn here. But that's it we wouldn't see the other seven times at all sadly.

But as Jeff pointed out that is a bit that's in the process of changing rapidly and we like to boast here on an odyssey about how five years ago on the easy one of our topics was will they find planets and I'll embarrass Jeff a little bit because I I stuck my neck out and I said the decade coming up after 1995 would either show that planets are pretty common or not and we made a very specific prediction just because the technological developments that Geoff was pioneering out it observatories in California were getting better and better in technology each year and you could predict the point where if there was Jupiter out there we would find it. And you know it actually surprised me quite a bit how quickly success came but I think you're too modest to say that probably three quarters of those 20 planets have been found by Jeff and his group and so quickly we have demonstrated the Jupiter type things in things bigger than Jupiter are pretty common. So we can probably sit here and probably Alan is the best expert on

this but I say something about when we can get the technology to find Earth like things I'm going to talk a little bit about this tonight and it's really quite challenging to blank out the star you just don't put your thumb up in front of it and say. And it's the kind of thing we could never have done before first of all it has to be done in space because the atmosphere that we have to look through is ground based astronomers is so you know distorting that it just doesn't allow us to do this very fine kind of work and it takes advantage to to blank out the star you take advantage of the fact that light acts like a wave and you collect the light at different locations and put it together so that the waves cancel from the star. Just like when you go to the seashore and you have quiet periods where the waves coming in in the waves going out are canceling and the sea surface is very flat. We'll do that by carefully positioning mirrors at some distance from each other collecting the white of the star that we're looking at and bringing it together with just infinite precision in order to make that star go black. By canceling the waves and then look adjacent to the star

for the white of the planets that are being lit up by the star that's a planet that's a mission called the terrestrial planet finder. And what's what's the timeframe for that. The launch is now scheduled around 2010 2011 I may be a little optimistic but some time after 2010 this is probably going to fly and it's a very exciting thing because it's going to look at the nearest few hundred stars and see things as small as Earth and it will also tell us whether there's water on those worlds. So we'll know whether we have Earth like worlds within commonly within some distance of our sun. Now to clarify something that that perhaps has confused at least some journalists that all of these 20 planets that have been found so far are in our galaxy. That's right our own Milky Way galaxy contains some 200 billion with a B stars and we're only sampling the stars that are within a few light years of us that is to say well within our own Milky Way galaxy and among those several hundred stars that we're watching we are finding these planets all of which are in our own galaxy.

So of course Allen Dressler you would look at that and then look at other galaxies and say. I wonder if that galaxy over there is a lot like this galaxy. But we're nowhere near being able to look and see those things. It hardly seems like we ever will be able to if we ever even be able to survey our home galaxy that even sounds astoundingly difficult but we do that astronomy all the time. We find representative samples we kind of figure out what it is where we can do the experiment and then we look to see whether the conditions are the same someplace else and we infer. Well there must be planets there too. I think people would be pretty excited just demonstrating that our own galaxy in the stars in it how often we find planets you know maybe we have time to do this before taking a short break maybe not but there was a serendipitous discovery announced just yesterday which is very exciting and that is that two things which are called brown dwarfs. So a little bit bigger than planets. You know maybe 10 or 20 or 30 times the mass of Jupiter but much smaller than stars two of them were found not where Jeff looks for them orbiting around some star but

freely floating in space. And this is quite amazing as as listeners may recall the University of Chicago has just started the largest survey with partners of the universe that's ever been done called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We're going to look at 100 million galaxies and we look at that at a big part of space. And we not only take pictures but we notice the colors of the things we are observing and the first two percent of the sky has been surveyed so far and we looked at all the objects a million things and that too cool. And we now know their temperature. Something like 900 degrees much cooler than a star in the spectrum absolutely clear Isabel. You can see water and you can see methane. So here are two planets.

Don't ask me how they got there. Not well super planets gallium arsenide apart from stars. I do have a suspicion how they got there but somebody can ask and they're floating around and because they're not next to a star in these two serendipitous cases we don't have the problem with the Starlight blocking them so much and with a very big telescope they took a spectrum and darned if there isn't water and methane methane of course is a gas that's all over Jupiter all over the planet is here and water is water. And we found it. All right hold that thought when we come back. We need to take a break but I'll ask you how you think they got there. I'll do the dirty work and we'll also take some calls our number 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4 before we break. Allen Dressler or Doug can you tell us where the talk is tonight. The talk is at the Chicago Hilton at the grand ballroom right in Michigan and if you write hundreds miss you can do something right office at Grant Park. OK. And it's in the grand ballroom and I know it's free OK. And I have a

quick question for Jeff Marcy before we break. When you find a planet you get to name it you know the way we do but actually we don't if we started naming the planets everybody would adopt those names and that would be a fair accompli on the other hand there's an international body called the International Astronomical Union and they've been charged with the responsibility of conjuring up names for the planets. And sadly this international body chooses names such as q t fourteen twenty nine thirty eight and we find that quite romantic of course at least four or something for us so I write as you can imagine and Jeff is not fly and my wife wants them to all be named planets Susan Susan one Susan to me but of course we astronomers are thinking of other names that would be a little catchier and so we're working on it. Oh all right OK well let's take a break when we come back we'll take some calls 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4. You're listening to Odyssey and Gretchen health and this is WBEZ

Chicago. Support for programming on WBEZ is provided by printer's row Book Fair featuring six tented blocks of new used and rare books. Two days of children's activities celebrity author readings and more than 70 literary programs included this year U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky Nikki Giovanni and a tribute to Mike Royko. Saturday and Sunday June 5th and 6 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on South Dearborn between Congress and Polk. Information is at 3 1 2 9 8 7 98 96. On the next FRESH AIR Michael Korda executive editor of Simon and Schuster remembers his early years in publishing editing Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann and Kurt Andersen discusses his new novel turn of the century a social satire about life in the year 2000. I'm Terry Gross joined us for the next FRESH AIR. Fresh air comes your way weekdays at 2 o'clock on WBEZ Chicago. You are listening to ninety one point five FM WBEZ Chicago this is Odyssey. I'm

Gretchen health. Doug Duncan is here today and he's brought some pals with him. Allen Dressler who is an astronomer from the Carnegie observatories who will be speaking tonight at the Chicago Hilton in the Grand Ballroom at 7:00 p.m. for free to the general public so everyone can go. We're also joined by Geoff Marcy who is professor of astronomy at San Francisco State University. Now Doug I will I will do the deed and I will ask you what your theory is about how those brown dwarfs got to be floating freely around. Well I should probably preface this by saying I'm not an expert in this particular theory but it seems very suspicious to me that since the work of Jeff and his colleagues has demonstrated that a number of stars not only have planets like Jupiter or even bigger than Jupiter but oftentimes have more than one that it actually turns out to be pretty difficult to keep multiple large planets in a solar system. You know Jupiter is pretty happy going around the sun. But if you have two or three or more large bodies it's relatively easy for gravity

to for two of them to come too close to each other and sort of Slingshot one of them and throw it out of the solar system never to return. So at the press conference yesterday I asked the people presenting the discovery if they thought that had happened to their planets and they sort of smiled and said well maybe and maybe not and nobody I don't think can tell you for sure yet. All right Jeff Mars you have another question. Are there any known binary star systems with planets and stars in a planet other than tattooing. It's quite interesting actually. Over half of the stars in our own galaxy are binary stars that is to say there's one star going around another star. And in fact four of the planets that we have found are indeed orbiting one of the stars in a binary system. So it's somewhat odd that our own sun is a single star but in fact we're finding that among wide by an Aries stars where that that is to say systems where the two stars are far enough apart planets can perfectly well orbit one or the

other or both of those two stars. They can orbit both not at the same time but there could be a set of planets rather than one star and then another set orbiting the other star although frankly there actually are quote stable orbits in which a planet could do a kind of figure eight around the two stars. It would be marginally stable but a sign it might eventually get ripped out of the system but that can happen for a while. And that's you know if you've found any yet. OK that we have an idea that that could be a possibility. OK but so far each planet gets one star and spins around that star that's right. OK let's take some calls 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4. Let's talk to Paul good morning Paul you're on WBEZ Paul. Oh I'm sorry I missed that it was very faint. Thanks for taking my call. My question is that you know I know that our solar system and the Milky Way galaxy. My question is how does one view other galaxies

in the Milky Way galaxy for example if another galaxy let's say is 10 light years away. How do we view that the Milky Way galaxy. When you look up into the sky Paul you see stars that are in our galaxy but there's a lot of empty space to be see through our galaxy to what's beyond. And if you look millions of light years away you see other faint glows in the sky that are whole other pinwheel looking galaxies in the further you look the more and more of them you see. It's basically just that the space is transparent so you can just keep looking until you look far enough away to see something along that direction. If you can get yourself far enough from the lights of Chicago that the sky is very dark. There actually is one other galaxy that you can see with just your eyes and it looks like if you've ever seen the Milky Way you sort of faint. A very faint cloud. If you took a part of the Milky Way and just put it there in the sky

this appears to your eye about the size of the moon. Remarkably it's not small but it's very faint. So you have to look at it under dark skies I was out in Zion Park and just as clear as could be here is this one other galaxy called the Andromeda galaxy in binoculars very easy to see. I want to ask you something when you say obviously were in the Milky Way so when you say if you've ever seen the Milky Way what you actually mean is that little wedge that's above us which is the more distant and a part of your right. The stars in the Milky Way that are close to us we see individually the ones that are out you know far away still in our galaxy blend together just because they're distant and that's what makes them that sort of like smear right. That looks so neat. All right Paul thanks very much for your call 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4 Let's talk to Neil Good morning Neal you're on WBEZ. Hi how you doing good. I was calling about Cochlear actually threatened your life I think that one of the things that we need to be limited by in fact they

probably are not humanoid. We probably are limited to the fact they are different every time. Pale and size human life on another planet may one second maybe a lifetime of them or vice versa. They may be getting larger or smaller than I think so I may never find time to communicate with it but I think we're down to about the fact that like that. I don't buy that. Well I had Geoff Marcy when you talk to the microbiologists. They are unanimous that if you can find a planet that has water in liquid form then the laws of biochemistry will take over you'll end up with complicated molecules like RNA DNA they will replicate you'll end up with competing large complex molecules that we wouldn't in the end call life. And they will develop in complexity so there's unanimity that life must proliferate in the galaxy. Probably there are thousands millions maybe billions of life forms out there. You're right that we may be a little

presumptuous in thinking that that life would resemble the life we have here on the earth and so we don't know the answer as to whether or not intelligent life might be like that here on the earth like we humans or completely different. And it's an open question. I would say. Since we scientists are somewhat conservative when we are forced into this question the answer would have to be drawn that there probably are some life forms out there that are something like those that we have here on the earth for something like two limbs two legs you know something like the ability to see. And so if their time scales for life are milliseconds it's hopeless I agree with you. But there probably are life forms out there among the 200 billion stars that are something like we humans. Well and there's some pretty There's a lot of variety right here on Earth. I mean if we were just using the models we have here on Earth that would give us a lot of ideas and things to work with encounters in pretty strange life forms. Yeah. Even right here in this radius.

And if you are making at least the first steps to find out whether this is true by going planning missions to Mars to look for a life that may have started there and maybe even could still be there in very simple form single cell organisms underneath the surface. NASA has a as again a part of the Origins Program a mission that will be coming up in the next decade called the sample return where they will go to what were River Valleys in long ago on Mars where water flowed and see whether life started there. Carl Sagan had a very provocative comment on the same topic. He said if you find life just once even if it isn't still living. If you find evidence that life developed elsewhere it changes life from a miracle into a statistic. And you know it. I think what he meant in the in the positive sense by that is you could no longer have the arrogance of saying the whole universe is us when it comes to life if you find it elsewhere then it seems very likely that you're going to find it in many places.

Well Geoff Marcy have a question for you and I know you're not a biologist so maybe you'll dodge this answer. Feel free. One we talk about water and we talk about temperature in these sorts of conditions for life but also to some extent we depend on having a certain amount of gravity and a steady amount of gravity on the earth. And you were talking about planets with strange orbits that I would assume would mean changing gravity on the planet. Does does that mean that we maybe need to think differently about or think more carefully about the role that gravity plays in life. Well there's two fascinating sides to this question. The planets that we have found that orbit in these wacky oval orbits that draw the planet close to the star and then far away would suffer one terrible fate which is that the temperature on those planets would change dramatically when the planet is close scorchingly hot when the planet is far away. Cold ice cold. So those planets themselves would in my opinion not be the most likely sites for life and indeed if there were any Earth like planets nearby those wacky planets those Earths would probably be gravitationally slingshot out of the system

so the bad news is that those stars with those wild planets are probably not the best places to look oddly enough for life on the other hand only about 5 or 6 percent of the stars have these kind of wacky Jupiter like planets. The remaining 95 percent of the stars in our galaxy we now know do not have such planets. So ironically it may be the stars around which we have found no Jupiter's at all in these wild orbits. It may be those stars that appear to be alone at the moment with our technology. They may be the ones that have Earth like planets in stable orbits with stable atmospheres and temperatures that could be the best sites that Petri dishes for life. Sounds like family values solar solar system stable stable orbits. All right let's take some more questions. 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4 Let's talk to Susan good morning Susan you're on WBEZ. Hi Ira. Know that if our galaxy were to buy another would someone on Earth

be able to tell the difference. Are you down the tree in question here. Well one thing you need to know is that these things happen extremely slowly. Galaxies are so enormous that if they do merge together or one is consumed by another it takes hundreds of millions of years so since humans are only been on this earth for a few million years we could have sort of found ourself in a world where another galaxy was very close by and it wouldn't seem to change at all in our lifetime and in fact over the entire human history would hardly have seemed to have moved at all. So it's it's true that you know some creature that lived a lot longer than we do might actually watch such an event happen and would probably continue to live perfectly well on the planet in which they lived. We're never going to see such a thing because even though the Andromeda Galaxy is coming our way it's going to be another billion years before it gets here. Indeed May I ask Allen Dressler a question are we in fact eating another little galaxy right now.

Yes in fact Jeff reminds me that there was a great discovery this year that in the direction of the secretary's Constellation a galaxy that was found sort of hidden because it was being torn up a little galaxy being spread across our own galaxy and those kind of things happen. But road kill. This doesn't happen so much. But even if there were it's probably true that if there were a wife on those planets in that little galaxy that's being torn up they would survive the experience. I think I think so probably all right. 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4. Let's talk with David good morning David you're on WBEZ. Hi thanks for taking my call Sure. I've heard that the moon was our moon was formed when a comet hit the earth and tore off a huge chunk. I was wondering if that was true and if so if we have any idea of when that would have happened. And then if you could have someone try and explain for a relatively intelligent lay person what's going on with the super string theory what that is how that relates to anything. I would appreciate it.

Well I'll take the. OK. You know I don't want to be strung out with the second one. It is indeed the case. We now fairly strongly believe that our own moon was formed when not a comet actually but a planet sized object probably the size of Mars slammed into the earth and ripped off some material of the earth's crust and that material was flung out into space in orbit around the Earth it solidified into what we now know as the moon. The evidence for this is quite strong the composition chemically of the moon is very similar to that of the crust of the earth as if in fact the moon is sort of a spoonful of the earth's crust. And so the most likely formation scenario is that for our moon we thank the moon missions and the astronauts for the ability to make that comparison you know people used to ask a lot well why spend all that money going to the moon you can learn anything or just have fun. And probably one of the most fundamental things we learn besides some people having a lot of fun a lot of

people. Is pretty strong evidence I agree with Jeff that the moon came from the earth. Where did the thing that hit the Earth go. Well it's been absorbed as a part of the earth and some of that material was flung out into space. And in fact the interesting thing of course is that our own Earth formed out of such collisions that is to say the earth originally of course wasn't here five billion years ago and it formed by a succession of little tiny planets planet as we sometimes call them slamming into each other melting at the interface sticking together and then another collision and yet another and that built the earth up from little seedlings into its current size. So before there's even planets if you look someplace where there's a lot of young newly born stars or stars just being formed for instance the Mirai Nebula a lot of people know the constellation of Orion and with binoculars you can see the sort of little fuzzy cloud in the constellation of Orion and as a matter of fact my own graduate student has demonstrated that more than half of the stars the young stars in Iran have discs of

dusty material around them. And this is the material out of which little by little you build up planets. So there's a lot of smashing a lot of collision. And in answer to the caller's question right at the beginning of the solar system is when this happened. So you know four billion years ago approximately there was a lot more stuff a lot more collisions gradually that stuff made planets some of it got flung away and the solar system came to be. So does the does that mean that the moon is about the same age as the earth or not to take a while frontage might be similar. The oldest rocks you can find. I might be wrong but the very oldest rocks are hard to find on the earth because of weather and erosion and weathering. But if you look hard and find very old earth rocks then you go to the moon. Almost all the moon rocks are comparable to the oldest rocks on the earth. Ok does anyone want to take that superstring side or why not. I think what you're referring to is this idea that the ultimate particles in nature are not points as we were sort of taught when we were studying this back in college. But there are little

loops of energy and what we call strings and it has consequence for how the Big Bang worked to have a model like that it's sort of like asking what's the ultimate nature of matter when it was extraordinarily energetic. And. And hot like it was at the Big Bang. It also apparently has application for what we call the dark matter problem there's all this matter floating around the universe who's affected by gravity we can see. But it doesn't give off any white and some people believe that if we understood this string theory if we could make a String theory that worked we would find out that that dark matter is a product of this string theory way of making the universe but it's. It's a relatively new field and it's still a mystery to us how it's going to work out. All right David thanks very much for your call 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4 we have another David good morning David you're on WBEZ. Good. I have a question for you. There's a lot of talk on on the actual substance of space and my question is how is space viewed as an actual space an actual

absence of matter. And if so I don't know if you have an actual substance there and if so is there is space. I'm going to space it forever and stars. And how did that space actually you know begin to appear to be coming into existence. Sure. Let me take the easy part of that and then they all turned over to the harder part of that space is not empty in two ways or at least potentially in two ways one is a direct way. And that is it was discovered only in the 1980s that just like the air above Chicago is not transparent if you look far enough you begin to notice that. Well let's use Los Angeles where I grew up. There's stuff there in the air interests and in between the stars. There is actually quite a lot of interstellar material. That's actually the main reason we can't look straight to the center of our galaxy to see if there's a black hole or not because we're embedded in the material in the galaxy and if we look at the interstellar material blocks our view. So there's actually physical stuff

dust and gas. But well that just sort of puts the question off to a smaller level because right and that's where I'll have things to Alan for instance could space itself even apart from any of the stuff floating around but the actual fabric of space. What are the properties of that down between the dust particles. This is this is tricky and I think I would duck it by saying that there really is this fabrication or fiction that we have that there is something like empty spaces Doug says is not. Really true. There is no such thing as space without matter and there's always energy and always some sort of mass in every volume of space it just gets very low density we tend to regard it as empty space so it has existence as much as the matter and the energy have existence it is part and parcel of the same thing. You know the person we must ask about this is since we're doing another astronomy program on Friday and will have Alex Philip Penco one of the astronomers who's measured the remarkable for the fact that maybe the universe is accelerating. If that is indeed happening rather

than slowing down like we've told listeners for years and years that was that would have to be due to the property of space itself having a heretofore unknown energy of the vacuum. And so I think we should ask your Friday guest that question. All right we definitely will but Alan let me let me press you. I would say the same thing I said to Doug is there no volume at which you have something. Well I mean there's no other way but you know between the particles between the things that you're saying are filling empty space. One of the great discoveries of this century was that our notions about discrete particles wasn't even right that there this in called quantum effects that even the locations of particles are sort of probabilistic functions so you know it's just the way we look at the macroscopic world and try to transfer our thoughts about nature onto this microscopic world aren't even real they aren't even correct. And so there when we make these little models by a couple points a couple atoms and what's in between that's just sort of a device we have to

try to understand it it's not really the way it looks. OK David thanks very much for your call. 3 1 2 8 3 2 3 1 2 4. Let's talk to Dan. Good morning Dan. You're on WBEZ. Hi thanks. Picture of one of the first missions I don't know what it was but it landed and the first thing that they did. The people down here did when they got to disinfect the roof irises. I wonder if there is any evidence that suggests that there are some. I can tell you that this is a tremendous concern to Nason now that they are for the first time talking about going to Tamar's a place where there might have been life. We don't really expect there's much just life floating around in space around us but in places like Mars there may have been life and there may be life an extraordinary amount of concern now is being exercised.

And if we go there to make sure that we don't contaminate Mars with our life form and that we don't bring anything back that would contaminate the life here. And that really was taken as not much of a threat with the moon shots and I think that may be what you were referring to but they did take precautions. But nobody really expected to be life on the moon because there's no no nothing you know it's just no atmosphere no water no nothing. In this time we're going to be much more careful and it's going to be a very great source of concern although I think it's something we can handle and will be very very careful about. Right Dan thanks very much for your call We're just about out of time but let's give some more information to folks Doug. Allen Dressler your talk tonight. Tell us again where this Hilton Hotel and towers Grant Park on Michigan and the ballroom is the grand ballroom and that is at 7:00 p.m. tonight right. And the theme of the talk is Origins origins. All right so that's open to the public everybody could go. Doug give us a little teaser about what we're going to talk about on Friday. Day two of astronomy.

Well on Friday astronomy palooza on Friday will have Alex Villa panko a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley one of the foremost experts on finding supernovas at the edge of the universe and using those as ways of tracing the motion of the galaxies finding out just how fast the universe is expanding and whether that expansion is indeed slowing down like we've all expected or giving away his result. Seems to be speeding up. What could possibly cause our whole universe to gradually be speeding up. Tune in Friday ham loves him very find out Westerns for him away right. All right well thanks very much Allen Dressler is an astronomer from the Carnegie observatory and one of the founders of the NASA's Origins Program. Geoff Marcy is professor of astronomy at San Francisco State University and Doug Duncan of course is professor in astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago and the education coordinator for the American Astronomical Society. Thank you very much for coming in this morning. Thank you thank you. Thanks also to Joshua Andrews for producing and directing Kathryn

Chandler for production assistance. Thanks to Steve Warren asked us and Steve behind him for engineering thanks to everybody who called. My apologies as always to those whose calls we did not get to worldview with Jerome McDonnell is up next. This is Odyssey I'm Gretchen and you're listening to WBEZ Chicago. Yes ma'am OK. Just on a planet that's evolving evolving it on. Its own. But Dean at 19 to second so it's reckoned a sun that is the source of all the sun you and me can see. The guy with the milk. On the billion it's a hundred.

In the middle. Using an expired. Us. With the support for this WBEZ program is provided by metamorph a full service I.T. consulting firm helping organizations solve business problems with information technology information a metamorph monthly I.T. executive briefings is that w w w met a more tech dot com slash events.

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