October 29, 2019 • 29 mins
What do we know about the asteroid belt and what can we learn from it?
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
What if we've been looking for life in all the
wrong places. Sure, we're searching for signs of life on Mars,
and we're hunting down planets around other stars and far
away solar systems, hoping to find one with an atmosphere
and maybe even signs of life. But what if life
could be out there, but not on a planet, not
(00:30):
even on a moon. What if life could be out
there but hiding in something much smaller. Hi, I'm Daniel.
(00:53):
I'm a particle physicist, a sometimes author, and a twice
a week podcast host. You are listening to the podcast
Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, brought to you by
I Heart Radio. My usual co host, Jorge isn't here
still this week. He'll be away for a little while,
but don't worry, folks, he'll be coming back soon. Our
(01:15):
podcast is dedicated to zooming around the universe, exploring everything
that's weird, that's amazing, that's crazy, that blows your mind,
that maybe you hear scientists talking about but never really
understood until today until we break it down for you.
So the goal of our podcast is to share with
you the amazing, crazy bunkers universe that we live in.
(01:36):
Without blowing your mind too much. We want to download
that information into your brain so that you really get it,
so you can appreciate, just like scientists on the cutting
edge of knowledge, how amazing and crazy this universe is.
And a lot of times on this podcast we go
far away and talk about the center of the galaxy
or other galaxies, or the structure of the whole universe,
(01:57):
or we zoom down a tiny little particles and talk
about how amazing and weird they are and the strange
rules that governed life of the quantum realm. But there
are mysteries close to home, and we have talked, for example,
about the mysteries of lightning and house skip stones, and
also about weird things going on in our solar system,
and that is the focus of today's episode. We want
to understand the weird stuff that's in our neighborhood. We
(02:20):
want to make sure, then we look over our shoulder,
we understand what's going on, because people think, oh, our
solar system, we've been exploring it for hundreds of not
thousands of years. Surely we understand what there is to
know there. Surely we have a grasp on everything that's
going on in the Solar System. Well, not true, and
some of those amazing mysteries are hiding in a place
(02:40):
you probably don't even think about. If I tell you
to imagine the Solar System, you probably think of the Sun.
First off, it's the biggest, baddest object in the Solar System,
and then of course the planets zooming around it, with
the star being our blue globe that we call home.
But there's something else there. There's another big piece of
the Solar System that takes up a huge chunk. It's
(03:01):
an important element, but it's not a dense object like
planets in the Sun. It's the asteroid belt. The asteroid
belt is this weird collection of rocks between Mars and Jupiter,
and it turns out there's a lot of things we
don't understand about. It's starting off with why is there
an asteroid belt. It goes planet planet, planet, planet, planet,
asteroid belt, planet, planet, planet, planet, anything that's weird in science,
(03:26):
anything that sticks out, that's a clue that's going to
show you the path to an answer. It's gonna reveal
something about why it looks that way and not some
other way. So every time we find a pattern that
doesn't quite fit, we ask why, and hopefully those answers
lead to mind blowing discoveries and probably more questions. But
it's not just the fact of the asteroid belt that's weird,
(03:48):
it's what's inside it. So the question will be answering
today is what's going on with the asteroid belt? And
I have to share with you that learning about the
asteroid belt, I had a personal oh my god, is
it aliens moment when one of these strange, bizarre, crazy
(04:11):
features of the asteroid belt was first discovered. We'll talk
about that soon, but first I was wondering, what do
people know about the asteroid belt? Do people out there
even know what's in the asteroid belt? And why it's interesting?
Does everybody know that there is an asteroid belt? So,
as usual to sort of get a sense for how
much people know and what their questions are, I walked
(04:31):
around campus at you see irvine and I asked people, Hey,
what do you think is in the asteroid belt? People
thought that was a weird question, but as usual, they
were games. So thank you again to the students that
use the irvine for answering a weirdos weird questions. Here's
what they had to say. But before you answer, think
to yourself, do you know what's in the asteroid belt?
(04:52):
How accurately could you describe it? Here the answers from
students at you see irvine for the most precious rocks,
and then now it's a debris because space jump in
all that, and then it's accumulating, So it can be
I believe, a combination of things of sizes at least
from larger to smaller, tiny rocks next to moon, maybe
(05:14):
the size of the moon, bigger, I don't know, combination
of sand and some other chemicals. I would say they're
pretty big rocks, but there's a lot of diversity there.
I'm under the impression that it's a lot of rocks
and maybe a couple of like icy stuff in there too.
They could be as big asn't want to as big
as Earth. It just depends, like where you are. I
(05:36):
would say it varies a lot, like maybe somewhere from
like the car through maybe like a small moon or something.
So of course the most popular answer is asteroids. That
makes sense. You wouldn't call it the asteroid belt if
you didn't have asteroids in it. But what are asteroids?
And of course you heard a lot of people say, rocks,
big rocks, small rocks, read the little rocks. Some people
(05:58):
even thought that there were rocks in there the size
of the moon. So there's a big variety of reactions
out there to what's in the asteroid belt. So that
makes me feel like, yeah, let's dig into it. Let's
make sure everybody out there knows what the asteroid belt is,
what we know about it, what we don't know about it,
and what amazing potential alien discoveries it might be hiding.
(06:20):
All right, So first of all, where is the asteroid belt.
The asteroid belt is between Mars and Jupiter, right, so
we got four inner planets and then we got this
big swath or rocks or asteroids, and then we got
the outer planets Jupiter, Saturn, and the Neptune Uranus. Of course,
so we sort of divides the Solar system. Right, you
(06:40):
have these inner rocky planets and then the asteroid belt,
and then you've got the big gas planets on the outside.
And that seems like a clue, right, So let's dig
in a little bit. What is in the asteroid belt. Well,
it's not just asteroids, right, Asteroids means a lot of things,
and the asteroid belt was discovered actually in the eight hundreds,
(07:00):
because some of these asteroids in the belt are big, like,
they are really big. In fact, the asteroid belt doesn't
just have asteroids in it, it also has dwarf planets,
planets that are as big as Pluto, not quite the
size of our moon, right, but these are big rocks.
And remember, the way we see these things in the
sky is we can't see them glow directly. They don't
(07:23):
give off light the way the sun does. We can
only see them when the Sun's light shines on them
and then bounces back to Earth, the same way we
see our own moon, which also doesn't actually glow in
the sky. It's just a reflection of the light from
the Sun. So any of these objects for us to
see them, they have to be shiny, and they have
to be big, because that's the only way we can
(07:44):
see this stuff. So of course, in the eighteen hundreds,
the first thing we found were the biggest ones. That's
back before we had amazing space telescopes to track all
these things down. And there are four objects in the
asteroid belt that take up a whopping half of the mass.
That's right. You add up all the rocks and set
and sand and dust and ice and all that stuff
in the asteroid belt, and why it Half of it
(08:07):
is in just four objects, and these were the first
four scene. Those are Series, which is a little dwarf planet,
Vesta Palace, and Hygia. Again, I don't know who's in
charge of naming these objects. I'm not even sure how
to officially do pronounce them, but I think it's sort
of awesome that they're out there, that's sort of dominating
the asteroid belt. So it's mostly these big four asteroids.
(08:30):
And then in the late eighteen hundreds people were looking
more and more and they saw smaller rocks. But it
drops off pretty fast, and so it took until about
eighteen sixty eight before people had seen a hundred of
these things, and then in the early nineteen hundreds they
had seen a thousand, and then by one we had
found ten thousand individual objects in the asteroid belt. And
(08:52):
now we have more than a hundred thousand individual objects characterized.
We know where they're going, we know half fast they're spinning,
we know their orbit. They each probably have names, though
those names, of course are probably not very creative. If
you have to name a hundred thousand objects in the
Solar System. You probably come up with a scheme, and
they probably have really boring names like letters and numbers.
(09:13):
So most of the mass is in just four these objects, right,
and those are really sort of like many planets. They
can't really even call those asteroids. But you know, a
lot of this is just terminology. What do you call
a planet? What do you call it dwarf planet? What
do you call an asteroid? This is just sort of
arbitrary stuff that we made up. Like a whole controversy
about whether Pluto is a planet or a dwarf planet
(09:35):
comes down to semantics. It's not like there's a clear
difference between one object and the other. People just have
to draw a line somewhere and then you say, well,
on this side of the line your planet over here,
your dwarf planet. Doesn't really necessarily mean anything. So sometimes
I feel like the whole controversy about whether Pluto is
a planet or not is a bit overblown. It's there,
we know what it is. It's a thing, you know,
(09:57):
it's part of our family. Do we have to be
so we're about labels anyway? Even if you add up
all the stuff in the asteroid belt, all the rocks
and dust and ice and all of that stuff that's there.
It's only four percent of the mass of the Moon.
That's right. The Moon is more than twenty five times
more massive than all the stuff in the asteroid belt
(10:18):
put together. And that tells you two things. One, we've
got a big moon, like it's the truth, like, of
all the moons in the Solar System, Earth is odd
for having such a big moon. Also, it tells you
that the asteroid belt is not that big, right, There's
not that much stuff in it. You probably imagine the
asteroid belt is like space totally dotted with rocks, and
(10:41):
like that scene in Star Wars where the Millennium Falcon
is trying to navigate its way at high speed through
those rocks and just barely whizzing by and almost crashing.
That's not the experience we have when we send probes
through the asteroid belt, because the asteroid belt is not
that dense. Remember, space is big, like really really big.
(11:01):
If you're gonna fly out into the Solar System, you're
very unlikely to hit a planet, right, because even though
planets are big, they're not big compared to the Solar System.
In the same way, the asteroid belt. Even though it's
distributed across lots of little rocks, it still doesn't fill
up space. It doesn't even come close to filling up space.
We have sent lots of probes to the outer part
(11:22):
of the Solar System and never even worried about having
them hit an asteroid. It's difficult, in fact, to hit
an asteroid. The Japanese recently sent up an awesome probe
to land on an asteroid and punch it to see
what it's made out of and understand, you know, is
it made out of carbon or silicon or ice or whatever.
And that was hard, right, So it's not easy to
(11:42):
run into an asteroid. If you want to fly your
spaceship through the asteroid belt, most likely you'll never even
see one. And if you just watch these things, they
don't even bounce into each other. Very often. Asteroids of
any size hit each other around every ten million years.
And that's because number one, there aren't very many in
space big, but also number two, because it's been around
for billions of years, and so by now a lot
(12:05):
of those collisions that were if they were going to happen,
they sort of already happened. And what you have left
is a bunch of asteroids in their own lane. It's
like a huge traffic jam, but all the collisions have
happened already, and all those wrecks have been towed off
the road, and now you just have a bunch of
clean lanes and safe drivers and everybody's sort of go
in their own way, so you can very safely navigate
(12:27):
through the asteroid belt, though you'll see some weird stuff,
like some of these rocks that we see in the
asteroid belt are kind of hard to understand. Some of
them are spinning super fast, Like it takes the Earth
twenty four hours to rotate one time, but it takes
these rocks less than thirty seconds some of them to
rotate to do a full rotation, and one of them,
the speed champion the asteroid belt, doesn't complete turn in
(12:51):
ten seconds, so it's spinning like crazy. And while most
of the things in the Solar System go in the
same direction, and that comes from the initial angular momentum
in the Solar system that's rotating blob of gas and
dust that formed the star and the planets and all
that stuff, some of them are going the opposite direction
their retrograde. They're like spinning the wrong way. So there's
(13:13):
a lot of clues there, and there's a lot of
clues about how the Solar System was formed. Why is
the asteroid belt there? Why is it there and looked
like this, Why does it have these weird elements in
it doing this strange stuff? A lot of fascinating questions
to dig into, and we'll dig into them, but first
we'll take a quick break. All right, So we're talking
(13:42):
about the asteroid belt. What mysteries does it contain? What
secrets of the origin of the Solar System are hidden
there in the asteroid belt? Well, it turns out a lot.
And the first question you might ask, if you're a
scientist is why isn't there a planet there? Like why
is there an asteroid belt and not just a planet?
If you make a plot of the distance from the
(14:03):
Sun of the various planets and you start with the ones,
you know, then there's sort of a gap there. You
expect there to be a planet there between Mars and Jupiter.
And very early astronomers, they were big into these kind
of patterns. We didn't have a detailed mathematical understanding of
how things worked, even before gravity and understanding orbits and stuff.
People were just looking at patterns like the distances from
(14:26):
these planets to the Sun, and it just didn't look right.
There was this weird gap there and made people think
could there be another planet there hiding. Then of course
we saw the little rocks there, and people understood, oh,
there's no planet there. There's just sort of a big
slew of rocks. But it makes you wonder why. And
one of the most natural stories to imagine is maybe
(14:47):
there used to be a planet there. Maybe there was
an ancient planet and got ripped apart by some disaster,
and what we're looking at now is basically the shrapnel
from some ancient murder mystery. They even named it. It's
called Phaeton, which is a really cool name for a planet. Unfortunately,
that's a cool story, but it's unlikely to be the
accurate scientific description of what happened there. But it just
(15:09):
shows you that people have been thinking about this for
a long time. People have been wondering why is an
asteroid belt there, Why isn't there a planet. And to
understand why there isn't the planet there, why we have
an asteroid belt, we have to understand two things. First
is how the Solar System was formed, Like, where did
this all come from? Anyway? How are any of the
planets made? And why wasn't there one made there? Well,
(15:31):
we think that the Solar System, it's ancient progenitor, is
just a big cloud of gas and dust and stuff.
Some of that gas is hydrogen, which probably comes from
the Big Bang. It's left over from billions of years ago.
Some of it is helium, also maybe from the Big
Bang or fused together hydrogen in the COREUS stars. And
then the rest of it, the heavier elements, either made
(15:53):
in old stars which then blew up and spewed their
remains all over the university, gathered back together by gravity,
or even the remnants of neutron star collisions. Remember, all
the gold and the heavy elements on Earth were made
not in stars, not in supernovas, but instead they were
made when neutron stars collided. Because that's the crazy situation.
(16:15):
You need to fuse those heavy metals. And we have
a whole podcast episode about that, which I suggest people
dig into if they like these questions. So we have
the raw materials, we've got the hydrogen, we've got the helium,
we got the heavy stuff. All this is left over
from previous activity in the universe and then what happens. Well, gravity,
Gravity is the dominant force that controls the structure of
(16:36):
the universe. It's the weakest force. It's totally weird. We
don't understand is it a force, is it just a
bending of space? Is it something else? Can it be
described by quantum mechanics. We have so many questions about gravity,
But one thing we do know about it is that
it almost always wins in the end because it's patient.
And remember that gravity has this other feature that, unlike
(16:57):
the other forces, it can't be opposed, like electromagnetism can
be balanced. You can have things that are neutral, but
gravity operates on everything with mass, and because we've never
seen anything with negative mass, gravity is only attractive. And
so it just keeps pulling and pulling and pulling. It's patient,
it's slow, but eventually it does what it needs to do.
(17:19):
And so you take this huge cloud of gas and
dust spread out across an enormous area, and slowly the
gravitational forces between these particles, tiny little objects. It tugs
them closer and closer, and it gathers them together and
eventually gathers it together. So densely that you get things
like stars and planets and other stuff. And you might think, first, well,
(17:42):
why doesn't it just gather everything together into one big blob, right,
Why doesn't it just make a big star? Why do
you get anything but the star? Then initial cloud of
gas and dust and particles. It's spinning, of course, because
everything in the universe is spinning from some previous interaction
that happened, maybe from the initial looks illusion of the
supernova or whatever that generated that stuff. And that spinning
(18:04):
can't just go away. Remember, in our universe we have momentum,
so if you push something in space, it will go forever.
If you start something spinning, it'll spin forever until something
stops it. And so this cloud of gas and dust
that created our solar system was spinning, and it is
still spinning, and that spinning keeps it from collapsing, but
only in the direction that it's spinning. It's spinning around
(18:27):
a plane. That plane is now the plane of our
solar system, and that's why everything in our solar system
is sort of flat, is spinning around the same axis
because that's the original access of spin. And in that direction,
gravity can't do everything. It's opposed by this rotation. The
rotation keeps it from falling into the very center. That's
why the Earth is in orbit around the Sun rather
(18:48):
than just falling in. That's why the Moon is in
orbit around the Earth rather than just falling in. But
in the other direction, perpendicular to the plane of the
Solar System, there's no rotation, and so gravity can do
its job and it flattens things as much as it can.
So gravity does all this work, and some of the
stuff is spread out, some of the gas and the
(19:09):
dust doesn't fall all the way into the center because
of this rotation. So the stuff in the center condenses
into a star, and the rest of the stuff grabs
itself together. It forms into these distributed objects, and that's
how you get the planets. The planets are only there
because the original blob was rotating. If it wasn't rotating,
we would just have one star. But now you have
these large gravitational objects, these planets, and they start to
(19:32):
affect the stuff around them. And Jupiter, of course, is
the monster planet. It has most of the mass of
all the planets. It's tiny compared to the Sun, but
of course it's huge compared to the Earth. And it
has its own gravity, and that gravity is very powerful,
and it yanks and it pulls on things. We've talked
to in this podcast about how Jupiter massages its own
(19:53):
moons because of the tidal forces, and this is exactly
the issue. We think that the gravity from Jupiter is
too strong to let the stuff in the asteroid belt
ever pull together to form a planet. So the asteroid
belt is sort of like leftovers from the original formation
of the Solar System. We think that a long time ago,
maybe in the first ten million years of the Solar System,
(20:15):
most of the Solar System looked a lot like the
asteroid belt ahead rocks and chunks of stuff that were
slowly gathering together. But Jupiter prevents those rocks in the
asteroid belt from getting any further. It keeps them down
from creating their own planet. It's like Jupiter is like
a union buster, right. It says, nobody get together. I'm
gonna treat you all individually. And so the tidal forces
(20:36):
from Jupiter prevent this from happening. Every time Jupiter sweeps around,
it tugs on all these objects and prevents them from
gathering together. Remember, gravity is slow, and gravity is gentle
and it doesn't take that much perturbation to prevent it
from pulling all of this stuff together. And Jupiter is
a big, popa planet, and when it sweeps around it
messes it all up. And you might think, well, if
(20:57):
Jupiter can do that on the inside, wasn't to do
that on the out side. Well, the reason is that
Saturn is further away from Jupiter. There's a bit more
space there, and literally there's more space there, not just
in the gap between the objects, but because Saturn is
further out, it has much more space to move, and
Jupiter's gravity drops from much more rapidly as you got
on the outside compared to being on the inside. While
(21:19):
it seems more dramatic to have had a planet there
which then got torn up in some sort of ancient
battle or collision between objects, that's not the case. In fact,
nothing really even got started there. They think there used
to be a lot more asteroids than the asteroid belt
when the Solar System was young, but then those got
tugged out of orbit and collided and probably a lot
of those hit the Earth. There's this period in the
(21:39):
early Solar System called the late heavy bombardment when a
lot of objects came raining in and landing on the
Earth and the other inner planets. So most of the
asteroid belt from the very early days has been lost,
either due to collisions like we talked about earlier, hitting
other planets, or just getting tugged out of their orbit
by Jupiter. So what we have is a small remnant
(21:59):
of our original asteroid belt. We're lucky, frankly, they even
have it at all. But there are some really fascinating
objects in the asteroid belt, and one in particular, that
dwarf planet Series that holds a special mystery, one that's
been in my mind for years, and we'll talk all
about it, but first let's take another break, al right.
(22:29):
So we're talking about the mysteries of the asteroid belt,
why we have it where it is, what's in the
asteroid belt, And the big Papa asteroid in the asteroid
belt is actually a planet, and it's called Series C
E R E S. And it's pretty big. It's almost
a thousand kilometers in diameter. This is no small rock.
This is something to be taken seriously. And Series is
(22:50):
a fascinating object for many reasons. But the thing that
really sticks out of me is something which literally sticks out.
They sent a probe past and it took a picture
of Series, and he saw something really weird on the surface.
All right, if you haven't heard of this before, it's
gonna blow your mind. It blew my mind when I
heard it. Series has something on it which looks like
(23:10):
a pyramid. Now, I know, pyramids are a favorite element
of stories of the occult, and people think maybe aliens
came to Earth and built pyramids and all sorts of stuff,
and a lot of that, of course, is nonsense. But
there is a weird pyramid on Series. And when I
first saw these pictures, I gasped. I thought, oh my gosh,
(23:30):
maybe this is the moment we find an alien artifact.
And I read a lot of science fiction and I'm
desperate defined aliens, and in a lot of those science
fiction stories where humanity comes across aliens, this is how
it starts. We find some weird feature on somewhere in
the Solar System and can't be explained. I mean, think
about two thousand and one, right, the monolith it was
(23:51):
there orbiting Jupiter. What we're looking for is something unnatural,
something strange, something which we cannot explain without invoking intelligent life.
And something like a pyramid. Wow, that's amazing. Now, this
pyramid on Series is pretty weird. First of all, it
rises five thousand meters above the surface. That's not tiny.
(24:13):
That's enormous, especially compared to the size of Series. It's
fully one percent of the height of Series itself. If
you had an object, if you had a feature that
big on Earth, it would be eight times higher than
Mount Everest right in relative size to the Earth. So
this is not a tiny mountain. If you are on Series,
(24:33):
you would definitely know about it. It seems like it's
about two hundred million years old. And they can date
these things by seeing how many collisions there are nearby stuff.
You can tell how old something is on in the
Solar System just by counting the sort of collision to
impact craters, because everything in the Solar System eventually is
hit with little rocks. Now, NASA, when they first saw it,
(24:53):
they announced this and they describe this, and I'm gonna
quote here they say, it's quote like nothing humanity has
ever scene. And not only is it something we've never
seen before, there's not even any other one on Series.
It's not like we saw this planet and we're like, oh, look,
it has all these weird bumps on it. How could
that be? What makes those It's maybe evidence of some
(25:15):
new geological feature. There's only one. So we have this
weird planet in the asteroid belt with this strange pyramid
on it. And this is not just a mountain which
looks a little bit like a pyramid. The first pictures
it looked a lot like a pyramid. It looked like
an artificial structure. This is the kind of thing that
makes people go, wow, we better get another picture of
(25:36):
this thing. And so of course they did. They sent
out more probes and they focus telescopes on it, and
everybody wanted to know what is this weird thing on Series?
And the short answer is we still don't really know.
There are some nice ideas. People think that Series underneath
has a molten core, but it's not molten rock. The
inside of the earth. When you dig down into the earth,
(25:57):
this molten rock. Because of all the pressure, Series has
molten mud. Right. Do you think that there's water on Series?
Maybe liquid water and it combines with a service to
make this sort of molten mud, and that sometimes this
mud might push up or spew up based on something
happening on the inside of series, and this mud is
(26:18):
actually not that hot, and so they call this sort
of like a cryo volcano, like a cold volcano. So
they think it's like some salty, rocky, frozen mud that
came out from the interior and pushed up like a
big ZiT. And that's possible, and they have some simulations
that suggests this kind of thing could happen. But then
why is there only one? Why is there just this
(26:40):
one feature? If this is the kind of thing that
happens inside series, you would expect to see more than one,
and you'd expect to see big ones and then lots
of little ones. But you know, sometimes weird things happen.
Sometimes in the solar system, there's a one off event,
and that could explain it. It could just be a strange,
one off event in the solar system that nobody understands.
(27:02):
Or hey, it could be aliens. We're still not are now.
Don't go running off and tell people that Daniel said
they're aliens in the Solar system. There probably aren't. That
kind of explanation requires extraordinary evidence. But I really enjoy
thinking about it. I really enjoy holding out hope that
maybe one of these things we're seeing in the Solar
system is not just going to tell us about the
(27:24):
origins of our solar system and how it was formed
and how planets are formed, and how solar systems everywhere
put together, and those are all fascinating questions I want
the answer to. But I'm holding out hope that maybe
there's a clue in our Solar system of something weirder,
something grander, something which reveals the secret about the universe
we have been dying to know the answer to, namely,
(27:44):
are we alone? And so it turns out that the
asteroid belt not only does it have lots of these
fun mysteries in it, but there's lots of places to hide.
There's lots of these asteroids we haven't examined, and there's
still the possibility that we could land on one of
these and explore it and find some thing weird, something
weirder even than a pyramid. We could find alien technology,
We could find all sorts of crazy stuff. The point
(28:06):
is that there's a huge amount of area in our
Solar system that remains unexplored, lots of opportunities to find life,
to find alien civilization, to find all sorts of crazy
stuff that would literally blow our minds. And so while
we should zoom our minds around the universe and think
about all the crazy stuff happening far away and also
under our feet, remember that right here in our neighborhood
(28:28):
there are plenty of opportunities to make mind blowing, earth shattering,
paradigm shifting discoveries. All right, this has been an episode
of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, all about the
mysteries of the Asteroid Belt. Thanks for tuning in, and
if you have questions about something you'd like to hear
us talk about, please send them to us at Questions
at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for tuning in.
(28:59):
If you still have a question after listening to all
these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to
hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or
email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain
the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. For
(29:21):
more podcast from my heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows yea
What if we've been looking for life in all the
wrong places. Sure, we're searching for signs of life on Mars,
and we're hunting down planets around other stars and far
away solar systems, hoping to find one with an atmosphere
and maybe even signs of life. But what if life
could be out there, but not on a planet, not
(00:30):
even on a moon. What if life could be out
there but hiding in something much smaller. Hi, I'm Daniel.
(00:53):
I'm a particle physicist, a sometimes author, and a twice
a week podcast host. You are listening to the podcast
Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, brought to you by
I Heart Radio. My usual co host, Jorge isn't here
still this week. He'll be away for a little while,
but don't worry, folks, he'll be coming back soon. Our
(01:15):
podcast is dedicated to zooming around the universe, exploring everything
that's weird, that's amazing, that's crazy, that blows your mind,
that maybe you hear scientists talking about but never really
understood until today until we break it down for you.
So the goal of our podcast is to share with
you the amazing, crazy bunkers universe that we live in.
(01:36):
Without blowing your mind too much. We want to download
that information into your brain so that you really get it,
so you can appreciate, just like scientists on the cutting
edge of knowledge, how amazing and crazy this universe is.
And a lot of times on this podcast we go
far away and talk about the center of the galaxy
or other galaxies, or the structure of the whole universe,
(01:57):
or we zoom down a tiny little particles and talk
about how amazing and weird they are and the strange
rules that governed life of the quantum realm. But there
are mysteries close to home, and we have talked, for example,
about the mysteries of lightning and house skip stones, and
also about weird things going on in our solar system,
and that is the focus of today's episode. We want
to understand the weird stuff that's in our neighborhood. We
(02:20):
want to make sure, then we look over our shoulder,
we understand what's going on, because people think, oh, our
solar system, we've been exploring it for hundreds of not
thousands of years. Surely we understand what there is to
know there. Surely we have a grasp on everything that's
going on in the Solar System. Well, not true, and
some of those amazing mysteries are hiding in a place
(02:40):
you probably don't even think about. If I tell you
to imagine the Solar System, you probably think of the Sun.
First off, it's the biggest, baddest object in the Solar System,
and then of course the planets zooming around it, with
the star being our blue globe that we call home.
But there's something else there. There's another big piece of
the Solar System that takes up a huge chunk. It's
(03:01):
an important element, but it's not a dense object like
planets in the Sun. It's the asteroid belt. The asteroid
belt is this weird collection of rocks between Mars and Jupiter,
and it turns out there's a lot of things we
don't understand about. It's starting off with why is there
an asteroid belt. It goes planet planet, planet, planet, planet,
asteroid belt, planet, planet, planet, planet, anything that's weird in science,
(03:26):
anything that sticks out, that's a clue that's going to
show you the path to an answer. It's gonna reveal
something about why it looks that way and not some
other way. So every time we find a pattern that
doesn't quite fit, we ask why, and hopefully those answers
lead to mind blowing discoveries and probably more questions. But
it's not just the fact of the asteroid belt that's weird,
(03:48):
it's what's inside it. So the question will be answering
today is what's going on with the asteroid belt? And
I have to share with you that learning about the
asteroid belt, I had a personal oh my god, is
it aliens moment when one of these strange, bizarre, crazy
(04:11):
features of the asteroid belt was first discovered. We'll talk
about that soon, but first I was wondering, what do
people know about the asteroid belt? Do people out there
even know what's in the asteroid belt? And why it's interesting?
Does everybody know that there is an asteroid belt? So,
as usual to sort of get a sense for how
much people know and what their questions are, I walked
(04:31):
around campus at you see irvine and I asked people, Hey,
what do you think is in the asteroid belt? People
thought that was a weird question, but as usual, they
were games. So thank you again to the students that
use the irvine for answering a weirdos weird questions. Here's
what they had to say. But before you answer, think
to yourself, do you know what's in the asteroid belt?
(04:52):
How accurately could you describe it? Here the answers from
students at you see irvine for the most precious rocks,
and then now it's a debris because space jump in
all that, and then it's accumulating, So it can be
I believe, a combination of things of sizes at least
from larger to smaller, tiny rocks next to moon, maybe
(05:14):
the size of the moon, bigger, I don't know, combination
of sand and some other chemicals. I would say they're
pretty big rocks, but there's a lot of diversity there.
I'm under the impression that it's a lot of rocks
and maybe a couple of like icy stuff in there too.
They could be as big asn't want to as big
as Earth. It just depends, like where you are. I
(05:36):
would say it varies a lot, like maybe somewhere from
like the car through maybe like a small moon or something.
So of course the most popular answer is asteroids. That
makes sense. You wouldn't call it the asteroid belt if
you didn't have asteroids in it. But what are asteroids?
And of course you heard a lot of people say, rocks,
big rocks, small rocks, read the little rocks. Some people
(05:58):
even thought that there were rocks in there the size
of the moon. So there's a big variety of reactions
out there to what's in the asteroid belt. So that
makes me feel like, yeah, let's dig into it. Let's
make sure everybody out there knows what the asteroid belt is,
what we know about it, what we don't know about it,
and what amazing potential alien discoveries it might be hiding.
(06:20):
All right, So first of all, where is the asteroid belt.
The asteroid belt is between Mars and Jupiter, right, so
we got four inner planets and then we got this
big swath or rocks or asteroids, and then we got
the outer planets Jupiter, Saturn, and the Neptune Uranus. Of course,
so we sort of divides the Solar system. Right, you
(06:40):
have these inner rocky planets and then the asteroid belt,
and then you've got the big gas planets on the outside.
And that seems like a clue, right, So let's dig
in a little bit. What is in the asteroid belt. Well,
it's not just asteroids, right, Asteroids means a lot of things,
and the asteroid belt was discovered actually in the eight hundreds,
(07:00):
because some of these asteroids in the belt are big, like,
they are really big. In fact, the asteroid belt doesn't
just have asteroids in it, it also has dwarf planets,
planets that are as big as Pluto, not quite the
size of our moon, right, but these are big rocks.
And remember, the way we see these things in the
sky is we can't see them glow directly. They don't
(07:23):
give off light the way the sun does. We can
only see them when the Sun's light shines on them
and then bounces back to Earth, the same way we
see our own moon, which also doesn't actually glow in
the sky. It's just a reflection of the light from
the Sun. So any of these objects for us to
see them, they have to be shiny, and they have
to be big, because that's the only way we can
(07:44):
see this stuff. So of course, in the eighteen hundreds,
the first thing we found were the biggest ones. That's
back before we had amazing space telescopes to track all
these things down. And there are four objects in the
asteroid belt that take up a whopping half of the mass.
That's right. You add up all the rocks and set
and sand and dust and ice and all that stuff
in the asteroid belt, and why it Half of it
(08:07):
is in just four objects, and these were the first
four scene. Those are Series, which is a little dwarf planet,
Vesta Palace, and Hygia. Again, I don't know who's in
charge of naming these objects. I'm not even sure how
to officially do pronounce them, but I think it's sort
of awesome that they're out there, that's sort of dominating
the asteroid belt. So it's mostly these big four asteroids.
(08:30):
And then in the late eighteen hundreds people were looking
more and more and they saw smaller rocks. But it
drops off pretty fast, and so it took until about
eighteen sixty eight before people had seen a hundred of
these things, and then in the early nineteen hundreds they
had seen a thousand, and then by one we had
found ten thousand individual objects in the asteroid belt. And
(08:52):
now we have more than a hundred thousand individual objects characterized.
We know where they're going, we know half fast they're spinning,
we know their orbit. They each probably have names, though
those names, of course are probably not very creative. If
you have to name a hundred thousand objects in the
Solar System. You probably come up with a scheme, and
they probably have really boring names like letters and numbers.
(09:13):
So most of the mass is in just four these objects, right,
and those are really sort of like many planets. They
can't really even call those asteroids. But you know, a
lot of this is just terminology. What do you call
a planet? What do you call it dwarf planet? What
do you call an asteroid? This is just sort of
arbitrary stuff that we made up. Like a whole controversy
about whether Pluto is a planet or a dwarf planet
(09:35):
comes down to semantics. It's not like there's a clear
difference between one object and the other. People just have
to draw a line somewhere and then you say, well,
on this side of the line your planet over here,
your dwarf planet. Doesn't really necessarily mean anything. So sometimes
I feel like the whole controversy about whether Pluto is
a planet or not is a bit overblown. It's there,
we know what it is. It's a thing, you know,
(09:57):
it's part of our family. Do we have to be
so we're about labels anyway? Even if you add up
all the stuff in the asteroid belt, all the rocks
and dust and ice and all of that stuff that's there.
It's only four percent of the mass of the Moon.
That's right. The Moon is more than twenty five times
more massive than all the stuff in the asteroid belt
(10:18):
put together. And that tells you two things. One, we've
got a big moon, like it's the truth, like, of
all the moons in the Solar System, Earth is odd
for having such a big moon. Also, it tells you
that the asteroid belt is not that big, right, There's
not that much stuff in it. You probably imagine the
asteroid belt is like space totally dotted with rocks, and
(10:41):
like that scene in Star Wars where the Millennium Falcon
is trying to navigate its way at high speed through
those rocks and just barely whizzing by and almost crashing.
That's not the experience we have when we send probes
through the asteroid belt, because the asteroid belt is not
that dense. Remember, space is big, like really really big.
(11:01):
If you're gonna fly out into the Solar System, you're
very unlikely to hit a planet, right, because even though
planets are big, they're not big compared to the Solar System.
In the same way, the asteroid belt. Even though it's
distributed across lots of little rocks, it still doesn't fill
up space. It doesn't even come close to filling up space.
We have sent lots of probes to the outer part
(11:22):
of the Solar System and never even worried about having
them hit an asteroid. It's difficult, in fact, to hit
an asteroid. The Japanese recently sent up an awesome probe
to land on an asteroid and punch it to see
what it's made out of and understand, you know, is
it made out of carbon or silicon or ice or whatever.
And that was hard, right, So it's not easy to
(11:42):
run into an asteroid. If you want to fly your
spaceship through the asteroid belt, most likely you'll never even
see one. And if you just watch these things, they
don't even bounce into each other. Very often. Asteroids of
any size hit each other around every ten million years.
And that's because number one, there aren't very many in
space big, but also number two, because it's been around
for billions of years, and so by now a lot
(12:05):
of those collisions that were if they were going to happen,
they sort of already happened. And what you have left
is a bunch of asteroids in their own lane. It's
like a huge traffic jam, but all the collisions have
happened already, and all those wrecks have been towed off
the road, and now you just have a bunch of
clean lanes and safe drivers and everybody's sort of go
in their own way, so you can very safely navigate
(12:27):
through the asteroid belt, though you'll see some weird stuff,
like some of these rocks that we see in the
asteroid belt are kind of hard to understand. Some of
them are spinning super fast, Like it takes the Earth
twenty four hours to rotate one time, but it takes
these rocks less than thirty seconds some of them to
rotate to do a full rotation, and one of them,
the speed champion the asteroid belt, doesn't complete turn in
(12:51):
ten seconds, so it's spinning like crazy. And while most
of the things in the Solar System go in the
same direction, and that comes from the initial angular momentum
in the Solar system that's rotating blob of gas and
dust that formed the star and the planets and all
that stuff, some of them are going the opposite direction
their retrograde. They're like spinning the wrong way. So there's
(13:13):
a lot of clues there, and there's a lot of
clues about how the Solar System was formed. Why is
the asteroid belt there? Why is it there and looked
like this, Why does it have these weird elements in
it doing this strange stuff? A lot of fascinating questions
to dig into, and we'll dig into them, but first
we'll take a quick break. All right, So we're talking
(13:42):
about the asteroid belt. What mysteries does it contain? What
secrets of the origin of the Solar System are hidden
there in the asteroid belt? Well, it turns out a lot.
And the first question you might ask, if you're a
scientist is why isn't there a planet there? Like why
is there an asteroid belt and not just a planet?
If you make a plot of the distance from the
(14:03):
Sun of the various planets and you start with the ones,
you know, then there's sort of a gap there. You
expect there to be a planet there between Mars and Jupiter.
And very early astronomers, they were big into these kind
of patterns. We didn't have a detailed mathematical understanding of
how things worked, even before gravity and understanding orbits and stuff.
People were just looking at patterns like the distances from
(14:26):
these planets to the Sun, and it just didn't look right.
There was this weird gap there and made people think
could there be another planet there hiding. Then of course
we saw the little rocks there, and people understood, oh,
there's no planet there. There's just sort of a big
slew of rocks. But it makes you wonder why. And
one of the most natural stories to imagine is maybe
(14:47):
there used to be a planet there. Maybe there was
an ancient planet and got ripped apart by some disaster,
and what we're looking at now is basically the shrapnel
from some ancient murder mystery. They even named it. It's
called Phaeton, which is a really cool name for a planet. Unfortunately,
that's a cool story, but it's unlikely to be the
accurate scientific description of what happened there. But it just
(15:09):
shows you that people have been thinking about this for
a long time. People have been wondering why is an
asteroid belt there, Why isn't there a planet. And to
understand why there isn't the planet there, why we have
an asteroid belt, we have to understand two things. First
is how the Solar System was formed, Like, where did
this all come from? Anyway? How are any of the
planets made? And why wasn't there one made there? Well,
(15:31):
we think that the Solar System, it's ancient progenitor, is
just a big cloud of gas and dust and stuff.
Some of that gas is hydrogen, which probably comes from
the Big Bang. It's left over from billions of years ago.
Some of it is helium, also maybe from the Big
Bang or fused together hydrogen in the COREUS stars. And
then the rest of it, the heavier elements, either made
(15:53):
in old stars which then blew up and spewed their
remains all over the university, gathered back together by gravity,
or even the remnants of neutron star collisions. Remember, all
the gold and the heavy elements on Earth were made
not in stars, not in supernovas, but instead they were
made when neutron stars collided. Because that's the crazy situation.
(16:15):
You need to fuse those heavy metals. And we have
a whole podcast episode about that, which I suggest people
dig into if they like these questions. So we have
the raw materials, we've got the hydrogen, we've got the helium,
we got the heavy stuff. All this is left over
from previous activity in the universe and then what happens. Well, gravity,
Gravity is the dominant force that controls the structure of
(16:36):
the universe. It's the weakest force. It's totally weird. We
don't understand is it a force, is it just a
bending of space? Is it something else? Can it be
described by quantum mechanics. We have so many questions about gravity,
But one thing we do know about it is that
it almost always wins in the end because it's patient.
And remember that gravity has this other feature that, unlike
(16:57):
the other forces, it can't be opposed, like electromagnetism can
be balanced. You can have things that are neutral, but
gravity operates on everything with mass, and because we've never
seen anything with negative mass, gravity is only attractive. And
so it just keeps pulling and pulling and pulling. It's patient,
it's slow, but eventually it does what it needs to do.
(17:19):
And so you take this huge cloud of gas and
dust spread out across an enormous area, and slowly the
gravitational forces between these particles, tiny little objects. It tugs
them closer and closer, and it gathers them together and
eventually gathers it together. So densely that you get things
like stars and planets and other stuff. And you might think, first, well,
(17:42):
why doesn't it just gather everything together into one big blob, right,
Why doesn't it just make a big star? Why do
you get anything but the star? Then initial cloud of
gas and dust and particles. It's spinning, of course, because
everything in the universe is spinning from some previous interaction
that happened, maybe from the initial looks illusion of the
supernova or whatever that generated that stuff. And that spinning
(18:04):
can't just go away. Remember, in our universe we have momentum,
so if you push something in space, it will go forever.
If you start something spinning, it'll spin forever until something
stops it. And so this cloud of gas and dust
that created our solar system was spinning, and it is
still spinning, and that spinning keeps it from collapsing, but
only in the direction that it's spinning. It's spinning around
(18:27):
a plane. That plane is now the plane of our
solar system, and that's why everything in our solar system
is sort of flat, is spinning around the same axis
because that's the original access of spin. And in that direction,
gravity can't do everything. It's opposed by this rotation. The
rotation keeps it from falling into the very center. That's
why the Earth is in orbit around the Sun rather
(18:48):
than just falling in. That's why the Moon is in
orbit around the Earth rather than just falling in. But
in the other direction, perpendicular to the plane of the
Solar System, there's no rotation, and so gravity can do
its job and it flattens things as much as it can.
So gravity does all this work, and some of the
stuff is spread out, some of the gas and the
(19:09):
dust doesn't fall all the way into the center because
of this rotation. So the stuff in the center condenses
into a star, and the rest of the stuff grabs
itself together. It forms into these distributed objects, and that's
how you get the planets. The planets are only there
because the original blob was rotating. If it wasn't rotating,
we would just have one star. But now you have
these large gravitational objects, these planets, and they start to
(19:32):
affect the stuff around them. And Jupiter, of course, is
the monster planet. It has most of the mass of
all the planets. It's tiny compared to the Sun, but
of course it's huge compared to the Earth. And it
has its own gravity, and that gravity is very powerful,
and it yanks and it pulls on things. We've talked
to in this podcast about how Jupiter massages its own
(19:53):
moons because of the tidal forces, and this is exactly
the issue. We think that the gravity from Jupiter is
too strong to let the stuff in the asteroid belt
ever pull together to form a planet. So the asteroid
belt is sort of like leftovers from the original formation
of the Solar System. We think that a long time ago,
maybe in the first ten million years of the Solar System,
(20:15):
most of the Solar System looked a lot like the
asteroid belt ahead rocks and chunks of stuff that were
slowly gathering together. But Jupiter prevents those rocks in the
asteroid belt from getting any further. It keeps them down
from creating their own planet. It's like Jupiter is like
a union buster, right. It says, nobody get together. I'm
gonna treat you all individually. And so the tidal forces
(20:36):
from Jupiter prevent this from happening. Every time Jupiter sweeps around,
it tugs on all these objects and prevents them from
gathering together. Remember, gravity is slow, and gravity is gentle
and it doesn't take that much perturbation to prevent it
from pulling all of this stuff together. And Jupiter is
a big, popa planet, and when it sweeps around it
messes it all up. And you might think, well, if
(20:57):
Jupiter can do that on the inside, wasn't to do
that on the out side. Well, the reason is that
Saturn is further away from Jupiter. There's a bit more
space there, and literally there's more space there, not just
in the gap between the objects, but because Saturn is
further out, it has much more space to move, and
Jupiter's gravity drops from much more rapidly as you got
on the outside compared to being on the inside. While
(21:19):
it seems more dramatic to have had a planet there
which then got torn up in some sort of ancient
battle or collision between objects, that's not the case. In fact,
nothing really even got started there. They think there used
to be a lot more asteroids than the asteroid belt
when the Solar System was young, but then those got
tugged out of orbit and collided and probably a lot
of those hit the Earth. There's this period in the
(21:39):
early Solar System called the late heavy bombardment when a
lot of objects came raining in and landing on the
Earth and the other inner planets. So most of the
asteroid belt from the very early days has been lost,
either due to collisions like we talked about earlier, hitting
other planets, or just getting tugged out of their orbit
by Jupiter. So what we have is a small remnant
(21:59):
of our original asteroid belt. We're lucky, frankly, they even
have it at all. But there are some really fascinating
objects in the asteroid belt, and one in particular, that
dwarf planet Series that holds a special mystery, one that's
been in my mind for years, and we'll talk all
about it, but first let's take another break, al right.
(22:29):
So we're talking about the mysteries of the asteroid belt,
why we have it where it is, what's in the
asteroid belt, And the big Papa asteroid in the asteroid
belt is actually a planet, and it's called Series C
E R E S. And it's pretty big. It's almost
a thousand kilometers in diameter. This is no small rock.
This is something to be taken seriously. And Series is
(22:50):
a fascinating object for many reasons. But the thing that
really sticks out of me is something which literally sticks out.
They sent a probe past and it took a picture
of Series, and he saw something really weird on the surface.
All right, if you haven't heard of this before, it's
gonna blow your mind. It blew my mind when I
heard it. Series has something on it which looks like
(23:10):
a pyramid. Now, I know, pyramids are a favorite element
of stories of the occult, and people think maybe aliens
came to Earth and built pyramids and all sorts of stuff,
and a lot of that, of course, is nonsense. But
there is a weird pyramid on Series. And when I
first saw these pictures, I gasped. I thought, oh my gosh,
(23:30):
maybe this is the moment we find an alien artifact.
And I read a lot of science fiction and I'm
desperate defined aliens, and in a lot of those science
fiction stories where humanity comes across aliens, this is how
it starts. We find some weird feature on somewhere in
the Solar System and can't be explained. I mean, think
about two thousand and one, right, the monolith it was
(23:51):
there orbiting Jupiter. What we're looking for is something unnatural,
something strange, something which we cannot explain without invoking intelligent life.
And something like a pyramid. Wow, that's amazing. Now, this
pyramid on Series is pretty weird. First of all, it
rises five thousand meters above the surface. That's not tiny.
(24:13):
That's enormous, especially compared to the size of Series. It's
fully one percent of the height of Series itself. If
you had an object, if you had a feature that
big on Earth, it would be eight times higher than
Mount Everest right in relative size to the Earth. So
this is not a tiny mountain. If you are on Series,
(24:33):
you would definitely know about it. It seems like it's
about two hundred million years old. And they can date
these things by seeing how many collisions there are nearby stuff.
You can tell how old something is on in the
Solar System just by counting the sort of collision to
impact craters, because everything in the Solar System eventually is
hit with little rocks. Now, NASA, when they first saw it,
(24:53):
they announced this and they describe this, and I'm gonna
quote here they say, it's quote like nothing humanity has
ever scene. And not only is it something we've never
seen before, there's not even any other one on Series.
It's not like we saw this planet and we're like, oh, look,
it has all these weird bumps on it. How could
that be? What makes those It's maybe evidence of some
(25:15):
new geological feature. There's only one. So we have this
weird planet in the asteroid belt with this strange pyramid
on it. And this is not just a mountain which
looks a little bit like a pyramid. The first pictures
it looked a lot like a pyramid. It looked like
an artificial structure. This is the kind of thing that
makes people go, wow, we better get another picture of
(25:36):
this thing. And so of course they did. They sent
out more probes and they focus telescopes on it, and
everybody wanted to know what is this weird thing on Series?
And the short answer is we still don't really know.
There are some nice ideas. People think that Series underneath
has a molten core, but it's not molten rock. The
inside of the earth. When you dig down into the earth,
(25:57):
this molten rock. Because of all the pressure, Series has
molten mud. Right. Do you think that there's water on Series?
Maybe liquid water and it combines with a service to
make this sort of molten mud, and that sometimes this
mud might push up or spew up based on something
happening on the inside of series, and this mud is
(26:18):
actually not that hot, and so they call this sort
of like a cryo volcano, like a cold volcano. So
they think it's like some salty, rocky, frozen mud that
came out from the interior and pushed up like a
big ZiT. And that's possible, and they have some simulations
that suggests this kind of thing could happen. But then
why is there only one? Why is there just this
(26:40):
one feature? If this is the kind of thing that
happens inside series, you would expect to see more than one,
and you'd expect to see big ones and then lots
of little ones. But you know, sometimes weird things happen.
Sometimes in the solar system, there's a one off event,
and that could explain it. It could just be a strange,
one off event in the solar system that nobody understands.
(27:02):
Or hey, it could be aliens. We're still not are now.
Don't go running off and tell people that Daniel said
they're aliens in the Solar system. There probably aren't. That
kind of explanation requires extraordinary evidence. But I really enjoy
thinking about it. I really enjoy holding out hope that
maybe one of these things we're seeing in the Solar
system is not just going to tell us about the
(27:24):
origins of our solar system and how it was formed
and how planets are formed, and how solar systems everywhere
put together, and those are all fascinating questions I want
the answer to. But I'm holding out hope that maybe
there's a clue in our Solar system of something weirder,
something grander, something which reveals the secret about the universe
we have been dying to know the answer to, namely,
(27:44):
are we alone? And so it turns out that the
asteroid belt not only does it have lots of these
fun mysteries in it, but there's lots of places to hide.
There's lots of these asteroids we haven't examined, and there's
still the possibility that we could land on one of
these and explore it and find some thing weird, something
weirder even than a pyramid. We could find alien technology,
We could find all sorts of crazy stuff. The point
(28:06):
is that there's a huge amount of area in our
Solar system that remains unexplored, lots of opportunities to find life,
to find alien civilization, to find all sorts of crazy
stuff that would literally blow our minds. And so while
we should zoom our minds around the universe and think
about all the crazy stuff happening far away and also
under our feet, remember that right here in our neighborhood
(28:28):
there are plenty of opportunities to make mind blowing, earth shattering,
paradigm shifting discoveries. All right, this has been an episode
of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, all about the
mysteries of the Asteroid Belt. Thanks for tuning in, and
if you have questions about something you'd like to hear
us talk about, please send them to us at Questions
at Daniel and Jorge dot com. Thanks for tuning in.
(28:59):
If you still have a question after listening to all
these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to
hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or
email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain
the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. For
(29:21):
more podcast from my heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows yea
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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