May 25, 2010 • 13 mins
To most people, planets are one of the most familiar of astronomical objects. After all, we do live on one. But how do these massive spheres get their start? Tune in to learn more about the birth of planets -- including our own -- in this podcast.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how
stuff works dot com. Hey, guys, welcome to the podcast.
This is also Madam look At, the science editor how
stuff works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb, science
(00:21):
writer at how stuff works dot com. Today we're going
to do the second podcast in our first series. I'm
very excited about this series. Yeah, how basically how things
come into being in the universe? Um, how cosmic bodies
get their start? Yeah. Last time we talked, we were
discussing um stars such as our sun, and so we're
(00:41):
very fine. Start is it's pretty good. I don't know.
But today we're going to change the topic and today
we're talking about planets. Yeah, so let's just talk about
planets for a secure quick definition. Maybe a planet is
a big body that revolves around the Sun in a
solar system, in our souls systems specifically. Yeah, I A.
(01:02):
You spelled it out even more at that two thousand
six meeting when they booted Pluto. Do you remember this.
There's a big deal. Countless songs written about it, like
what um, oh what's his name? As one us a
separate podcast, yeah no, um oh the rapper, Um, it's
(01:23):
really cool track bring back Pluto. I have no idea
what you're talking about. All I can think of is
digable planets. Is that about Pluto? No, that was just
the I'm cool like that. I'm chill like that, you know, Okay,
it was kind of so. Anyway, the IAU spelled it
out at their two thousand six meeting and they decided
(01:45):
that in order to qualify as a planet it wasn't
just going to be a size game anymore. You have
to orbit the Sun. Of course, you have to have
enough gravity to develop into a sphere. Yeah, but here's
where Pluto gets knocked the park. According to an article
in Universe Today by Frazer Cane, he said that Pluto
(02:05):
would have to have cleared the neighborhood of its orbit.
So what they're just saying here is that Pluto would
have had to either sucked in surrounding bodies or knocked
them away. And sorry, Pluto, you couldn't do that. Too
much of a owner. So if we were just looking
to our now eight planets to uh figure out how
planets form, we wouldn't have a whole lot of candidates
for developing theories and all sorts of stuff. So we've
(02:28):
started to look to exoplanets too. Yeah, and that's the
that's one of the real key things about studying these
these very distant worlds is that our understanding of solar
systems and how they work in planetary planetary formation, we
based it on the model that we have closest his hand,
which is our solar system, which is logical. But you know,
(02:49):
eventually you need to throw some more models in there
so you know what is possible. You know, it's like
if you were you know, if you were like a
lonely guy trying to figure out how you know, women work,
and you only knew one girl, you know, you might
get a pretty clear idea of how she works, but
you know, there are a lot of different ladies out there. Yeah,
I am tempted to probe this, and but I won't.
(03:10):
I won't get into questions about your love life because
we talk about science here. This is not the love line.
And women defy science. Indeed, they do do. Women defy logic.
Some would say that so scientists need more data points
right to figure out how planets form, so they look
to exo planets. Specifically, they have about four fifty three
(03:31):
extra planets as of right when we went into as
of Sinco to Mayo. And actually this is what Kepler
is doing, by the way, looking for exo planets in
the milky web. The first exo planet was actually discovered
by a radio astronomer at the Penn State by the
name of Dr Alexander Can. I was waiting for you
(03:52):
to try to say, his last name is a crazy
last name. When did he When did he discover it? Um?
About um? However, the body was rotating around a dead
star or a pulsar, right, so this isn't very exciting.
It's exciting, well, it was exciting, but it wasn't entirely
what hang out, I mean the sun is dead there? Yeah. Yeah.
So extra planets fallow roughly into two categories. You have
(04:16):
worlds like our own, which are called appropriately enough earthlike
planets or terrestrial planets, and then you have the gas
giants like Jupiter. Say yeah, and there are a whole
lot fewer earthlike planets around, but we'll come back to
these categories in a sec. Oh. And of course, the
other value in in finding exoplanets, especially those earthlike exo planets,
is that we could one day possibly move there once
(04:39):
we've totally used up this planet. Yeah, why not? Yeah?
In fact, I mean a lot of people point out
that that's it's going to be key to the long
term survival of the human race, such as your new
favorite idol, Stephen Hawking. Why everybody's idol? Yeah, that's true. Yes. So,
now that we've covered the basics of planets and extra
planets slid, let's do a little flashback to rough four
(05:00):
point five billion years ago. So at the stage r L,
what was the state of our solar system a few
billion years back? Well, our son was a fledgling proto star,
still trying to pack in enough matter that it's so
that you could get the gravity cranked up, get that
(05:21):
nuclear fusion going, and uh, you know, start actually doing
some solar business. Um everything else just basically a big
rotating cloud of particles called a solar nebula. Pseudo planets
per se. No, just cosmic dust, mere twinkles in the
universe's eye, dust in the wind, except not really wind yet.
(05:41):
That's coming though, right, it is coming. So with the
formation of the Sun and the remaining gas and dust,
it was free to flatten into a rotating proto planetary disc. Yeah.
And then within the swirling debris. You get your rocky
particles are starting to get all restless, they do some
colliding their form large amousses that soon attracted even more
(06:02):
particles via gravity. Is everybody's friend in this scenario, right,
And this is this is the same process that you
see in most cosmic formation theories accretion, where little particles
are drawn together to become bigger particles which in collide
and other with other like sized particles. And it's just
like the snowball going down the mountain basically, right. So,
(06:23):
some of these particles start to contract under gravity to
create bodies called planetismals, which then collide with other planetismals
to become the solid inner planets. And this is called
the planetismal hypothesis. Meanwhile, what's going on with the gas giants?
The gas giants actually coming to being because you have
gases that are frozen out there and they're colliding with
(06:44):
each other. They're forming these these big giant balls of
frozen gas and uh yeah, eventually those become the gas
giants in the outer orbits. So why did the gas
giants get the shaft? Why did they get relegated to
the outer bounds of our solar system. Well, the theory
is the wind I said, the wind was come and back. Uh,
specifically the solar wind. And uh, this is not wind
(07:05):
as you know it on Earth, but it's a steady
flow of plasma that emanates from a star. We have
it today, but back in the ye old days of
the Solar system, it was a lot stronger, strong enough
to blast the lighter elements such as hydrogen and helium
away from the inner orbits. So you know, they're blasted away, right,
And the farther they get away from the Sun, the
(07:28):
the less solar wind there is to propel them, all right,
and then they get drawn into the gas giants, um,
the growing gas giants, which adds to their gravity and
uh and makes them more gases than the inner planets. Right,
and then they're also pretty far away from the Sun,
so they get kind of cold. Right, Yes, everything chills
back down. And that's a nice theory, but not so
(07:51):
fast because back there's a little tweak. This goes right
back to what we were talking about earlier about how
our Solar system is the the closest model first to
base all these theories on. But then we discover some
sort of exoplanets doing something a little different, and it
throws the theory into question, forces us to tweak it. Right. So,
this particular exo planet that messed with the theory was
(08:12):
fifty one Pegasi B and it was a hot Jupiter
that orbited very close to its son. So what do
we mean by a hot Jupiter sexy planet? No, it's
so it's like a it's like a Jupiter, sque planet,
big gas giant, but it's close to the Sun. It's
in the inner orbit, right, it's not the outer orbit
like men except so they were like, whoa, how how
that happened? And so this new theory, uh, is that
(08:35):
a planet like that still forms in the in the
outer orbit and then moves into the closer orbit, right
thanks to something called orbital migration. And orbital migration concerned
me at first because I was thinking, we'll shoot, what
if our planets weren't in fixed orbitals? You know, what
if Jupiter was migrating across the Solar System and bam
(08:56):
was going to slammer it into Earth and we would
be gobbled up and consumed and cast into thousands of
parts and orbiting around the Sun haphazardly. That would that
kind of stink. But no, no, no, no, no. Orbital
migration in this sense is is a finite process. Yeah,
it's part of the formation of that solar system and
it stops. Yeah, our our solar system for now pretty stable. Yeah,
(09:16):
definitely pretty stable. So there you have it. Um from
dust to a planet. Um. That's the basic genesis. Without
getting into you know, more specific planetary formation um situations
with the forming of a crust, etcetera. All we are
is dust in the wind, Robert, or dust in the
solar nebula, dust in the in the solar wind. You know,
(09:38):
it really is fast. I mean it's kind of it
sounds cliche and kind of like some sort of a
hippie space song, but I mean I mean that dust
that there was, you know, in the primorical universe. I
mean we're essentially that, you know, matter can't be created
or destroyed. So we're all it's you know, it's who
we are. It's trippy, yes, So if you want to
(09:59):
trip out in some more interesting articles, go to the homepage.
We've got all sorts of stuff like Robert's new article
on how planets form, or doing some planet hunting, or
the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or even the Drake equation.
Did you reread that? I loves great probably my favorite equation.
We also have a Facebook now Facebook account, yep, you
(10:21):
can search for that under stuff from the Science Lab,
and if you go on Twitter you can find us
under lab Stuffert is really sure. Robert's really rocking us
out on Twitter these days. Yeah, we're trying to update
it pretty regularly with our you know, links to new articles,
links to outside articles we think are pretty groovy, and
just random stuff that comes up. Oh and we have
(10:42):
a viewer mail listener mail. We don't have viewers per se,
we do have the sermail. And this comes to us
from Rico on the Island of Hawaii. Yeah, this is
the Big Island, and Vica writes, hellose science podcasters Allison
and Robert. Name is Rico, and I live on the
Big Island of Hawaii. I haven't been to the Volcano
(11:04):
Park yet. I just moved here five months ago from Illinois.
That's quite a move from Illinois to Hawaii. First off,
he says, I would trade Vogue any day for fog.
Perhaps I shouldn't unciate it that a little bit more.
I would trade Vogue with a v any day for fog.
Vogue isn't cool at all. It's so bad here you
can't even see the ocean that's seven miles away, can't
(11:25):
see the Kohala Mountains from way Kaloa. Fog is horrible
and it just messes up the beauty of Hawaii and
sometimes gives you bad headaches. That's awesome, I mean, not
the headaches. Rico also writes, well, thanks for reading my ramble.
I had to write this at ten pm after I
listened to the podcast, and for the second time, vogue
is horrible and isn't better at all. Fog is the best,
(11:48):
signed Rico, and it's so cute. Yeah, and again, of
course is volcanic fog? Right, So this pertained to the
Death by Volcano podcasts that we just stand a couple
of weeks ago. Well, Rico, I have to tell you, um,
hit that Volcano National Park as soon as possible, because
that play is amazing, like seriously, like like I went
there years and years ago, and like you can like
(12:11):
basically walk under a rainbow and a creator. You can
look down in a creator and there's a rainbow underneath you.
It's I mean, it's crazy, It's like being in another planet. Yeah,
but maybe it's not so great if you live there
all the time. Like that's I mean, well that's the thing.
That's the thing about living in a wife from My
buddy moved out there, uh originally and uh he ended
up you know, he was there for a couple of years,
(12:31):
but then he came back. I mean, it's it's rough
living on an island, yeah, even if you do know
how to serve, even if it is awesome. So thanks
for writing, Rico. We really like hearing from listeners. And
if you want to send us an email about Hawaii
or robots or Vogue or even the birth of a planet,
send us an email. That's science stuff at how staff
(12:53):
works dot com. For more on thiss and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Want more
how stuff works, check out our blogs on the house
stuff works dot com home page.
Yeah, welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how
stuff works dot com. Hey, guys, welcome to the podcast.
This is also Madam look At, the science editor how
stuff works dot com. And this is Robert Lamb, science
(00:21):
writer at how stuff works dot com. Today we're going
to do the second podcast in our first series. I'm
very excited about this series. Yeah, how basically how things
come into being in the universe? Um, how cosmic bodies
get their start? Yeah. Last time we talked, we were
discussing um stars such as our sun, and so we're
(00:41):
very fine. Start is it's pretty good. I don't know.
But today we're going to change the topic and today
we're talking about planets. Yeah, so let's just talk about
planets for a secure quick definition. Maybe a planet is
a big body that revolves around the Sun in a
solar system, in our souls systems specifically. Yeah, I A.
(01:02):
You spelled it out even more at that two thousand
six meeting when they booted Pluto. Do you remember this.
There's a big deal. Countless songs written about it, like
what um, oh what's his name? As one us a
separate podcast, yeah no, um oh the rapper, Um, it's
(01:23):
really cool track bring back Pluto. I have no idea
what you're talking about. All I can think of is
digable planets. Is that about Pluto? No, that was just
the I'm cool like that. I'm chill like that, you know, Okay,
it was kind of so. Anyway, the IAU spelled it
out at their two thousand six meeting and they decided
(01:45):
that in order to qualify as a planet it wasn't
just going to be a size game anymore. You have
to orbit the Sun. Of course, you have to have
enough gravity to develop into a sphere. Yeah, but here's
where Pluto gets knocked the park. According to an article
in Universe Today by Frazer Cane, he said that Pluto
(02:05):
would have to have cleared the neighborhood of its orbit.
So what they're just saying here is that Pluto would
have had to either sucked in surrounding bodies or knocked
them away. And sorry, Pluto, you couldn't do that. Too
much of a owner. So if we were just looking
to our now eight planets to uh figure out how
planets form, we wouldn't have a whole lot of candidates
for developing theories and all sorts of stuff. So we've
(02:28):
started to look to exoplanets too. Yeah, and that's the
that's one of the real key things about studying these
these very distant worlds is that our understanding of solar
systems and how they work in planetary planetary formation, we
based it on the model that we have closest his hand,
which is our solar system, which is logical. But you know,
(02:49):
eventually you need to throw some more models in there
so you know what is possible. You know, it's like
if you were you know, if you were like a
lonely guy trying to figure out how you know, women work,
and you only knew one girl, you know, you might
get a pretty clear idea of how she works, but
you know, there are a lot of different ladies out there. Yeah,
I am tempted to probe this, and but I won't.
(03:10):
I won't get into questions about your love life because
we talk about science here. This is not the love line.
And women defy science. Indeed, they do do. Women defy logic.
Some would say that so scientists need more data points
right to figure out how planets form, so they look
to exo planets. Specifically, they have about four fifty three
(03:31):
extra planets as of right when we went into as
of Sinco to Mayo. And actually this is what Kepler
is doing, by the way, looking for exo planets in
the milky web. The first exo planet was actually discovered
by a radio astronomer at the Penn State by the
name of Dr Alexander Can. I was waiting for you
(03:52):
to try to say, his last name is a crazy
last name. When did he When did he discover it? Um?
About um? However, the body was rotating around a dead
star or a pulsar, right, so this isn't very exciting.
It's exciting, well, it was exciting, but it wasn't entirely
what hang out, I mean the sun is dead there? Yeah. Yeah.
So extra planets fallow roughly into two categories. You have
(04:16):
worlds like our own, which are called appropriately enough earthlike
planets or terrestrial planets, and then you have the gas
giants like Jupiter. Say yeah, and there are a whole
lot fewer earthlike planets around, but we'll come back to
these categories in a sec. Oh. And of course, the
other value in in finding exoplanets, especially those earthlike exo planets,
is that we could one day possibly move there once
(04:39):
we've totally used up this planet. Yeah, why not? Yeah?
In fact, I mean a lot of people point out
that that's it's going to be key to the long
term survival of the human race, such as your new
favorite idol, Stephen Hawking. Why everybody's idol? Yeah, that's true. Yes. So,
now that we've covered the basics of planets and extra
planets slid, let's do a little flashback to rough four
(05:00):
point five billion years ago. So at the stage r L,
what was the state of our solar system a few
billion years back? Well, our son was a fledgling proto star,
still trying to pack in enough matter that it's so
that you could get the gravity cranked up, get that
(05:21):
nuclear fusion going, and uh, you know, start actually doing
some solar business. Um everything else just basically a big
rotating cloud of particles called a solar nebula. Pseudo planets
per se. No, just cosmic dust, mere twinkles in the
universe's eye, dust in the wind, except not really wind yet.
(05:41):
That's coming though, right, it is coming. So with the
formation of the Sun and the remaining gas and dust,
it was free to flatten into a rotating proto planetary disc. Yeah.
And then within the swirling debris. You get your rocky
particles are starting to get all restless, they do some
colliding their form large amousses that soon attracted even more
(06:02):
particles via gravity. Is everybody's friend in this scenario, right,
And this is this is the same process that you
see in most cosmic formation theories accretion, where little particles
are drawn together to become bigger particles which in collide
and other with other like sized particles. And it's just
like the snowball going down the mountain basically, right. So,
(06:23):
some of these particles start to contract under gravity to
create bodies called planetismals, which then collide with other planetismals
to become the solid inner planets. And this is called
the planetismal hypothesis. Meanwhile, what's going on with the gas giants?
The gas giants actually coming to being because you have
gases that are frozen out there and they're colliding with
(06:44):
each other. They're forming these these big giant balls of
frozen gas and uh yeah, eventually those become the gas
giants in the outer orbits. So why did the gas
giants get the shaft? Why did they get relegated to
the outer bounds of our solar system. Well, the theory
is the wind I said, the wind was come and back. Uh,
specifically the solar wind. And uh, this is not wind
(07:05):
as you know it on Earth, but it's a steady
flow of plasma that emanates from a star. We have
it today, but back in the ye old days of
the Solar system, it was a lot stronger, strong enough
to blast the lighter elements such as hydrogen and helium
away from the inner orbits. So you know, they're blasted away, right,
And the farther they get away from the Sun, the
(07:28):
the less solar wind there is to propel them, all right,
and then they get drawn into the gas giants, um,
the growing gas giants, which adds to their gravity and
uh and makes them more gases than the inner planets. Right,
and then they're also pretty far away from the Sun,
so they get kind of cold. Right, Yes, everything chills
back down. And that's a nice theory, but not so
(07:51):
fast because back there's a little tweak. This goes right
back to what we were talking about earlier about how
our Solar system is the the closest model first to
base all these theories on. But then we discover some
sort of exoplanets doing something a little different, and it
throws the theory into question, forces us to tweak it. Right. So,
this particular exo planet that messed with the theory was
(08:12):
fifty one Pegasi B and it was a hot Jupiter
that orbited very close to its son. So what do
we mean by a hot Jupiter sexy planet? No, it's
so it's like a it's like a Jupiter, sque planet,
big gas giant, but it's close to the Sun. It's
in the inner orbit, right, it's not the outer orbit
like men except so they were like, whoa, how how
that happened? And so this new theory, uh, is that
(08:35):
a planet like that still forms in the in the
outer orbit and then moves into the closer orbit, right
thanks to something called orbital migration. And orbital migration concerned
me at first because I was thinking, we'll shoot, what
if our planets weren't in fixed orbitals? You know, what
if Jupiter was migrating across the Solar System and bam
(08:56):
was going to slammer it into Earth and we would
be gobbled up and consumed and cast into thousands of
parts and orbiting around the Sun haphazardly. That would that
kind of stink. But no, no, no, no, no. Orbital
migration in this sense is is a finite process. Yeah,
it's part of the formation of that solar system and
it stops. Yeah, our our solar system for now pretty stable. Yeah,
(09:16):
definitely pretty stable. So there you have it. Um from
dust to a planet. Um. That's the basic genesis. Without
getting into you know, more specific planetary formation um situations
with the forming of a crust, etcetera. All we are
is dust in the wind, Robert, or dust in the
solar nebula, dust in the in the solar wind. You know,
(09:38):
it really is fast. I mean it's kind of it
sounds cliche and kind of like some sort of a
hippie space song, but I mean I mean that dust
that there was, you know, in the primorical universe. I
mean we're essentially that, you know, matter can't be created
or destroyed. So we're all it's you know, it's who
we are. It's trippy, yes, So if you want to
(09:59):
trip out in some more interesting articles, go to the homepage.
We've got all sorts of stuff like Robert's new article
on how planets form, or doing some planet hunting, or
the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or even the Drake equation.
Did you reread that? I loves great probably my favorite equation.
We also have a Facebook now Facebook account, yep, you
(10:21):
can search for that under stuff from the Science Lab,
and if you go on Twitter you can find us
under lab Stuffert is really sure. Robert's really rocking us
out on Twitter these days. Yeah, we're trying to update
it pretty regularly with our you know, links to new articles,
links to outside articles we think are pretty groovy, and
just random stuff that comes up. Oh and we have
(10:42):
a viewer mail listener mail. We don't have viewers per se,
we do have the sermail. And this comes to us
from Rico on the Island of Hawaii. Yeah, this is
the Big Island, and Vica writes, hellose science podcasters Allison
and Robert. Name is Rico, and I live on the
Big Island of Hawaii. I haven't been to the Volcano
(11:04):
Park yet. I just moved here five months ago from Illinois.
That's quite a move from Illinois to Hawaii. First off,
he says, I would trade Vogue any day for fog.
Perhaps I shouldn't unciate it that a little bit more.
I would trade Vogue with a v any day for fog.
Vogue isn't cool at all. It's so bad here you
can't even see the ocean that's seven miles away, can't
(11:25):
see the Kohala Mountains from way Kaloa. Fog is horrible
and it just messes up the beauty of Hawaii and
sometimes gives you bad headaches. That's awesome, I mean, not
the headaches. Rico also writes, well, thanks for reading my ramble.
I had to write this at ten pm after I
listened to the podcast, and for the second time, vogue
is horrible and isn't better at all. Fog is the best,
(11:48):
signed Rico, and it's so cute. Yeah, and again, of
course is volcanic fog? Right, So this pertained to the
Death by Volcano podcasts that we just stand a couple
of weeks ago. Well, Rico, I have to tell you, um,
hit that Volcano National Park as soon as possible, because
that play is amazing, like seriously, like like I went
there years and years ago, and like you can like
(12:11):
basically walk under a rainbow and a creator. You can
look down in a creator and there's a rainbow underneath you.
It's I mean, it's crazy, It's like being in another planet. Yeah,
but maybe it's not so great if you live there
all the time. Like that's I mean, well that's the thing.
That's the thing about living in a wife from My
buddy moved out there, uh originally and uh he ended
up you know, he was there for a couple of years,
(12:31):
but then he came back. I mean, it's it's rough
living on an island, yeah, even if you do know
how to serve, even if it is awesome. So thanks
for writing, Rico. We really like hearing from listeners. And
if you want to send us an email about Hawaii
or robots or Vogue or even the birth of a planet,
send us an email. That's science stuff at how staff
(12:53):
works dot com. For more on thiss and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Want more
how stuff works, check out our blogs on the house
stuff works dot com home page.
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