March 5, 2019 • 44 mins
Pluto may not be a planet, but it definitely exists. Not every case is so clear. The history of near-Earth astronomy contains many cases of bodies that may or may not have ever existed in the solar system we call home. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick continue their journey through space to survey once-hypothetical bodies that took work to prove, once-imagined bodies that are now confirmed phantoms, and the unsolved mysteries where questions remain. This time, the destination is a hypothetical planet beyond the orbit of Pluto.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and we're back or part two or is this part
two or does it kind of stand alone to a
large time. I think this one stands alone. Yeah. Okay,
(00:24):
So well, last time, if you were with us, in
the last episode, we were exploring what we were sort
of calling the lost Daughters of autun the planets that
once were thought to exist somewhere in the schlore system,
whether in ancient times or in recent centuries, but we
later found out probably never existed or definitely never existed
in some cases. So examples we talked about included Antikathon
(00:48):
and the Central Fire. What was the deal with that?
Oh wow, you just have to go back and listen
to the episode. But yeah, this complex notion where, um,
the Sun is not the center of the universe, the
Earth is not the center of the universe, but something
called the Central Fire is at the center, and Earth
is actually closer to the Central Fire than the Sun.
So it's you know, this sort of complex uh model
(01:11):
of the cosmos based on uh, you know, the best
observational data of the day of like ancient times, ancient Greece. Yeah,
combined with certain religious mythological ideas yea Pythagorean cosmology sort of.
But then also we talked about the scientific thinking that
(01:31):
led to the belief in such a thing as the
planet Vulcan, a planet believed to be inside the orbit
of Mercury, super close to the Sun, as was proposed
by Urban la Verier. And of course we also talked
about Phaeton, the the Phaeton or Phaeton the the best
subject of a Renaissance painting of all time. Yes, but
(01:53):
for the purposes of main purposes of our discussion, the
the idea that that they thought, well, the asteroid belt
maybe used to be planet, and maybe this is this
is what we would call that planet if it were
still a whole exactly right. So today we wanted to
carry this discussion forward to talk about other ideas about
planets that are thought to maybe exist somewhere in the
(02:13):
Solar System but haven't yet been confirmed. In the last episode,
all the planets that we talked about, we're we're pretty
sure now have never existed at any time. I mean,
with two of them were quite sure, but there are
still questions. For example, there has long been a question
about what lies at the furthest reaches we we talked about,
(02:33):
you know what happens when you go down as far
as you can into the Solar system, like the Sun,
is this pit this well where you go all the
way down? Are there are things that are hard to
see because they're so close to the Sun. When you
think about the opposite end, could there be things that
are hard for us to see because they're so far
And of course we have to realize how how confusing
(02:53):
this may seem at first, because it's easy to think
that we have our Solar system pretty figured out at
this point, right, I mean mostly if you're listening to this,
you probably grew up memorizing the planets Mercury, Venus, with Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.
And then there's the whole issue of Pluto, and some
of us get a little bit out of shape, right
when when someone tells us actually, Pluto isn't a full
(03:17):
fledged planet, it's more of a dwarf planet, etcetera. And uh,
you know when when maybe don't roll with change all
that well, but it's easy to think Okay, but that's it, right,
there's nothing new to discover in the Solar System, because meanwhile,
we are continually spotting new exo planets that are light
years upon light years away, like far distant reaches of
(03:38):
the observable universe. So if we're figuring that out, then
surely we've got everything squared away in our immediate neighborhood. Yeah,
it only makes sense that that's the way it should go, right,
Why are we seeing exo planets when there's still a
question of whether there could be a planet in our
own Solar system we don't know about. And unfortunately that's
just a side effect of the different ways we have
(04:00):
of detecting things. It actually may be much easier to
detect the presence of a planet orbiting a distant star
because you can definitely see that star, and you can
tell by certain things. You can tell by if the
star wobbles, if there are other gravitational influences on that star.
You can tell by the what's known as the transit method,
if something is passing in front of the star from
(04:22):
our perspective and causing it too dim. Yeah, I think
I was thinking about it this way. Um, I was
thinking of beach houses. Imagine you're staying in one beach house,
you know, sizeable beach house, and they tend to be
you know, with lots of lots of beds for multiple
families or groups to stay and at the same time,
so you're in one beach house and then you're adjacent
to another beach house and you you you gaze out
(04:45):
at the other beach house. You see some lights on,
and you ask yourself, I wonder if anyone is staying there,
and you observe it until you find definite signs that
there is an individual in that house, and then then
maybe you can count how many individuals are in that house.
But then if you have the same question about your
own beach house, well then you can. There are ways
to try and figure that out, but not the same
(05:08):
not the same ways, right. You might do a bit
of listening, you might do a bit of roaming around,
of rattling the curiously locked doors that go who knows where.
That's a really good analogy. I like that a lot.
And so by running around within our own house, we
have discovered, by say the early nineteen hundred, late eighteen hundreds,
(05:29):
early nineteen hundreds, we had discovered a lot of stuff.
We discovered eight planets at that point. The first six
planets Mercury, Venus, of course, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn
have been known about since ancient times. The ancient astronomers
with the naked eye could see them in the night
sky and charted their movements and all that. Then in
seventeen eighty one you had Uranus or Uranus. We still
(05:52):
have to decide which one we truly prefer. Uranus was
found by Sir William Herschel with a telescope. He wanted
to name it after King George, and fortunately that didn't happen. Uh.
Then Laveryer, the French astronomer, predicted the placement of Neptune
by the wobble in Uranus um and he he said,
I predict there's another planet here and you can find it.
(06:13):
And then they went and looked for it and they
did find it. And that was in the eighteen forties.
So we're up to seven planets at this point by
the eighteen forties. By the way, as long as we're
snickering at at the planetary name Uranus, I do want
to throw in to call back to an older episode
that I hope that one day someone writes a science
fiction tale in which a starship is headed towards Uranus
(06:36):
and it's called the Guya Bolga. That would be a
great ship title there. That is brilliant. That is absolutely brilliant.
Wait a minute, I think I said. Did I say
a minute ago that Neptune was the seventh planet? I
feel like I've got that ringing in my head for
some reason. If I said that, that's entirely wrong. Neptune
is the eighth planet. Obviously. Uh So, apologies if I misspoke.
If not, this is just maybe something we can edit out.
(06:58):
Sorry I had to say that before I forgot. But yes,
the guy balda that that should be the ship to Uranus.
Absolutely much more evocative and resident than Voyager two or
whatever they've previously used. But let's pull it back and
meet a guy. You ready to meet a guy, A
mustachio gentleman. Yes, okay, so it is time to meet
a fellow by the name of Perceval Lowell. And I
(07:19):
think we visited this guy on the podcast before. That
mustache does look familiar. So Perceval Lowell was born to
a wealthy, prominent family in Boston in eighteen fifty five.
The Lowell family. So he was brother of a Lawrence Lowell,
who was a lawyer who ended up becoming president of
Harvard University. He was also the brother I didn't realize
(07:40):
this until recently of the poet Amy Lowell, who I
guess is considered a modernist poet. She sometimes called an imagist. Um.
But I picked out one of her poems because it
had an image that seemed maybe a bit relevant to today. Um.
The poem is called Balls. I'm not going to quote
the whole thing, but she writes, throw the blue ball
above the little twigs of the tree tops, and cast
(08:02):
the yellow ball straight at the buzzing stars. All our
life is a flinging of colored balls to impossible distances.
I think the image there is that all our life
is a flinging of colored balls, like we're doing the flinging.
But you could also think of it is that everything
that human life is is being flung around on a
colored ball in the void of space. Yeah, that's that's
(08:23):
the whole human experience, just right there on the surface
of this weird ball among other weird balls. It's always
a weird thing to consider. I mean, I know Sagan
pointed that out about like the picture of the Earth.
When you take a picture of the Earth, everything human
there has ever been is in that picture. Yeah, that
pale blue dot that contains our beginning and may well
(08:45):
contain our end. But anyway, back to Amy's brother, Perceval,
so Perceval roll I think in his early days, I guess,
since he was sort of a man about town, except
town was like the whole world, and especially like the
eastern part of Asia. Like he traveled a lots inner
national fleneur maybe um and he he traveled through the
eighteen eighties and the eighteen nineties, and at one point
(09:06):
became Foreign Secretary to the Korean Special Mission to the
United States. But then later in the eighteen nineties, Percival
Lowell became more and more fascinated with astronomy, particularly with
the planet Mars. And there was something interesting going on
in the late eighteen hundreds with the planet Mars. There
was this Italian astronomer named Giovanni Chaparelli who had been
(09:28):
studying the planet Mars through a telescope, and he perceived
what looked to him like a series of lines on
the surface of the planet that he in eighteen seventy
seven called cannally, an Italian word meaning channels. But apparently
these canally were taken by some English speaking audiences to
be canals, kind of a false cognate inference, as in
(09:51):
canals like in Venice, artificial structures made by intelligent tool
using creatures like us. And this idea kind of became
a sensation, right, Yeah, this, this had a tremendous effect
on on the way we perceived the planet Mars. I mean,
its effects are still felt today and the way we
think about Mars despite everything that we've learned since then. Yeah, Like,
(10:12):
why how come when we talk about aliens that go
to is to talk about Martians? Especially in the early
twentieth centuries, it was always Martians And when't Venusians or
anything like that. I mean, occasionally Venusians would pop up,
but it's not Santa Claus versus the Venusians. It's Santa
Claus versus the Martians. Yeah, or in War of the World,
you know why why the Martians Martian threat? Exactly? So,
(10:34):
the the idea of alien canals on Mars really got personal.
Lowell's gears cranking, and he decided to turn his attention
and his wealth and his resources to astronomy in the
eighteen nineties, and in doing this he founded the Lowell
Observatory and Flagstaff, Arizona, still there today. Yeah, and Flagstaff
(10:54):
is certainly a great place to gaze at the stars,
and just a cool place in general. I like Flagstaff
so personal. Lowell became a passionate defender of the idea
that there was or had been, intelligent civilization on Mars.
And he put this theory forward in a bunch of
published writings, using observations from the Lowell Observatory to back
(11:14):
up his argument. And so I want to quote from
his nineteen sixteen New York Times obituary with a few abridgements.
The author rights quote. The great controversy among astronomers, in
which he played a leading part, began in nineteen oh
seven after his announcement that the observations made by his
astronomical station proved that Mars was inhabited. Professor Lowell had
(11:36):
put the theory forward tentatively as early as eighteen. Many
imminent astronomers in this country in Europe accepted his conclusions
of nineteen o seven as unassailable. Others were skeptical Professor
Lowell's theory begins with the demonstration that the primary requisites
for human life exists on the planet water, heat, and atmosphere.
(11:56):
His positive proof of the existence of human life on
Mars is the network of lines which marks certain areas
of the planet's face, indicating the digging of artificial canals,
which would require an intelligence and engineering skill as great
or greater than possessed by the inhabitants of this Earth.
So I think he's making a few jumps here, Yes, yeah,
(12:17):
I mean the main jump, of course is that is
that there are no such canals. And uh, and the
more we looked at Mars, and then ultimately as we
began to to send probes to the Red planet, it
became increasingly clear that there are absolutely no canals. Yeah,
when we we got photos of Mars from a probe
in in the nineteen seventies which showed yeah, definitely not
(12:40):
nothing there, right and and uh, and you know we
talked about this before in the show. And you know,
dealing with early observations, there is a there's more room
to see things that are not there, especially if you
don't have the ability to really cat do any photography
at all. It's so it's very observational and then very
and then very easy to maybe think you see something
(13:02):
or misremember something you've seen, or or in fact, the
more you look at it see faint signs of the
thing you want to see. Yeah, there's so much interesting
stuff in the history of astronomy about things people said
they saw during the days of earlier optical telescopes without
modern instruments and modern uh telephotography, where like the ash
(13:25):
and Light remember that episode, and the planet Vulcan itself.
You know that wasn't just predicted, like people said they
saw the planet Vulcan up there by the sun during
an eclipse. Who knows what they actually saw, but clearly
the process of astronomical observation was was much cruder back then.
But Little's Little's argument is kind of funny. So he
says astronomers can see white surfaces on the poles of Mars, right,
(13:49):
and he says that these are ice caps, and in
a way that he's correct about that there are ice
caps on Mars, but he said they would melt and
shrink in summer and then freeze and grow larger again
in winter. And so he observed that the Martian spring
came and the ice melted, and at that point the
dark lines or the canals would grow darker quote, even
showing straight black lines criss crossed over the surface and
(14:12):
over the surface of the orange ochre areas uh and
that he said, these dark lines would disappear again in
the Martian autumn. And he concluded from this that the
darkened areas around the canals were flourishing with plant life
bearing leaves and grasses during the summer, which had died
away again in the winter when the water froze up
and became scarce. And from this he argued that Mars
(14:34):
must have been a very parched planet where water is
in high demand, which meant that the people who lived
there would have had to make very careful use of
a highly limited water supply, or else quote would find
themselves at last face to face with the relentlessness of
a scarcity of water, constantly growing greater, until at last
they would all die of thirst, either directly or indirectly,
(14:55):
for either they themselves would not have water enough to drink,
or the plants or animals which constituted their diet would
perish for lack of it. An alternative of small choice
to them unless they were conventionally particular as to their
mode of death. So Lowell concluded that they had to
build canals on Mars, that only irrigation on a vast
scale could prevent the Martians from dying from a lack
(15:18):
of water, and thus the proof of the existence of
civilization on the surface of Mars. Well, it's a fun argument,
and I love the world building of it. If you know,
if it were just purely science fiction, that that would
be marvelous. But as we've already touched on, evidence did
not support this theory. Yeah, and there were skeptics at
the time. We should say it wasn't like everybody believed
(15:38):
this until we had a Mars probe, like take photos
of the surface from up close. Right, Though, certainly one
of these possibilities is far more exciting than the other.
So so you can understand why that one would be
the one that the idea of canals on Mars would
be Uh, the idea that would show up in more
headlines and would and would capture the collective imagination, right uh.
And and Lowell's career of influential, controversial, and sometimes incorrect
(16:02):
observations and hypotheses did not in there there was an
interesting thing I came across where Lowell also believed that
once while observing the planet Venus, he saw quote spokes
radiating from a hub within the planet Venus. But in
a two thousand three paper by Sheehann and Dobbins Uh,
the authors argued that what actually probably happened here is
(16:22):
that because of the way he manipulated the telescope to
look at Venus, he had accidentally converted it into a
crude opthalmoscope, which would have been showing him images of
the blood vessels within his own eyeball. Oh my goodness.
And he included an image and in our notes here
for me to look at here, and it does line
up rather well with the arteries of the eye. Yeah,
(16:43):
But it doesn't stop there either. So Lowell was also
in the planet predicting business. And we'll discuss his planet
predictions when we get back from a break. Thank thank alright,
we're back. So thus far we've talked about Lowell's thoughts
concerning um Mars, a known planet, but now we're gonna
get into the unknown. We get intune into the study
(17:05):
and the prediction of of of hypothetical planets. Yeah, and
remember how the eighth planet Neptune had been discovered. Again,
uh Laveryer looked at the orbit of Uranus and said, Okay,
by the way it's moving, we can tell something is
influencing it. It's not moving based on what our predictions
should be. So what if we pose it another another
(17:27):
object out there of a certain mass and a certain position,
then we could explain why Uranus moves the way it does.
And so he posited Neptune, and it turned out Neptune
was there. He was correct, and so this is a
fantastically useful and successful prediction based on the laws of physics.
So in the early years of the twentieth century, after
studying the orbits of the outer gas giants like Uranus
(17:50):
and Neptune, Lowell tried to do the same thing. He
concluded that there was another planet yet to be found
based on those orbits, something out there is messing with
Uranus and Neptune. And yet again, like with the correct
prediction of Neptune and the incorrect prediction of Vulcan by
la Verier, this was on that basis, on the basis
of inferred gravitational influences on the orbits of these known objects,
(18:13):
so in nineteen o five or nineteen o six, Perceval
Lowell initiated a massive hunt for this ghost planet. The
project was initially called the Invariable Plane Search, and the
ghost planet was called Planet X. And this project went
on for many years. It proceeded in stops and starts
throughout several phases, even after Perceval Lowell himself actually passed
(18:35):
away in nineteen sixteen, so Perceval Lowell never got to
see how this project turned out, though he wrote books
about He wrote a book called I Think Like a
Memoir of the trans Neptunian Planet. But on February eighteenth,
nineteen thirty, fourteen years after Lowell's death, an astronomer at
Lowell Observatory named Clyde Tombo actually did discover a massive
(18:57):
object beyond Neptune with the help of the with the
help of a loaned sum of money that I think
they used to buy new instruments from personal Lowell's brother
who had been the head of Harvard and this object
was Pluto, though Pluto was not nearly as massive as
the planet that Lowell had predicted out there, and later
actually turned out more accurate measurements of the orbit and
massive Neptunes, such as by the voyage or two mission
(19:20):
basically obviated the need for a planet X to explain
our observation. So you actually looking at Uranus and Neptune,
there was no need to to infer a planet X.
So it seems there's just no planet out there right
now we can conclude there's no need to explain anything.
It's probably there's probably nothing. I mean, we have Pluto
to be sure. And uh and and again, like we
(19:40):
discussed earlier, you can go back and forth on exactly
how we should classify Pluto. But here's the thing. There's
no question that there are other objects in our solar
system beyond Pluto. Pluto is not the stop sign for
our solar system. There there's plenty of other objects out there. Yeah,
the solar system kind of has a shell of icy
(20:01):
debris floating around it. Yeah. And so it's not like
you you would get to Pluto and there would essentially
be a sign saying like last stop toll Alpha Centauri.
Uh No, there there's the possibility for other other things,
and we know for a fact that there are other things. First,
there's the general category of trans Neptuneian objects such as
the dwarf planet Eiris Uh between thirty seven point nine
(20:25):
and ninety seven point six astronomical units away from the Sun.
Is actually larger than Pluto by mass, though a little
smaller by volume. Oh and just quickly, an astronomical unit
is the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Correct. Yeah,
so Earth is one a U from the Sun, et cetera.
So U is is way up. It's way out there. Yeah.
(20:47):
Other dwarf planets include UH series, um Hamiya, and Makamaki.
And then consider the said noise. This is where it
really begins to get weird. These are trans Neptunian objects
with a parahelion. Again, this is a point of least
distance from the Sun of at least fifty a U.
(21:08):
So if they're closest to the Sun, they are still
beyond the Kuiper belt, which lies thirty to fifty AU
from the Sun. This is an asteroid belt like scattering
of leftover debris. And all three known you know, verified
said noise have really cool names. First of all, there's Sedna,
discovered in two thousand three, named for an Inuit sea goddess.
(21:29):
And that's where we get said noise, because when we
discovered earlier, it become a classification. And then there's two
thousand twelve vp H one one three a k A. Biden,
discovered in twelve and named for then Vice President of
the United States Joe Biden. So wow. And then I
wonder who is the person who has the most onion
(21:51):
articles written about them? Who also has an asteroid named
about not an asteroid, an object in space named after them?
Is it Biden? It might be Biden. And then the
third one of note here, discovered in twenty fifteen is
t G three seven. The t G stands for the Goblin.
The goblin, Yeah, the Cheddar Goblin. No, just the goblin.
(22:13):
I mean, if it's Cheddar and it's too far away,
it might be monster. So Seddon is the largest, the
Goblin is furthest away, and all of them have really
weird orbits, so their distance from the center of things
from our son varies greatly. And if you look at
a chart of their of their orbits, I really get
the sense of imagine, imagine a typical orbit that has
(22:35):
been stretched out like a rubber band. Yeah, so pretty
much all the planets I think have have elliptical orbits.
They're not perfectly circular, but the inner planets, their orbits
are pretty close to circular. There only a few percent
off from being circular. But these orbits are just massively
off from being circular. They are super stretched out ovals.
(22:58):
And one of the weird things I noticed in in
at least one of the pictures you've got here early
on Robert is that they almost kind of like look
like they're there. They're paraheliens, are kind of aligned almost
in the same direction. I wonder why that might be.
We'll come back to that. We'll come back, because that's
that's definitely leads to a few different mysteries here, uh
in additionally to having just weird orbits. Again, they are
(23:18):
so far away from from the Sun um of certainly
when you look at their their extremes, but even at
their parahliens are pretty extreme. The Goblin, for instance, has
an estimated orbital period what we can think of as
a year of thirty two thousand, one hundred and seventeen
point twenty nine earth years. That's how long it takes
for for the Goblin to go around the Sun. And
(23:42):
to put that in context, a year on Pluto is
two hundred forty eight earth years. That's how long it
takes Pluto to go around the Sun. And this thing
is that much further away. The goblins distance from the
Sun ranges from sixty five point one a U to
one thousand, nine hundred and fifty five A Wow. That
is crazy far away. Yeah, and their additional sedenoid candidates
(24:04):
and suspected to be many more. We're talking eighty to
ninety of these critters, and they're distant and weird. Orbits
can't be fully explained by the influences of known Solar
System objects either. So for starters, they're too far from
the Sun to be influenced by the gas giants, and
they're too close to the Sun to be influenced by
(24:28):
other distant stars. So something else is influencing them. But
what so, there are a few reasonable candidates to consider here. Uh.
The big one, the main one that we're most interested
here with is uh that there might be an undiscovered
giant planet comparable to Uranus or Neptune still orbiting our
Sun somewhere out there in the dark. So there could
(24:50):
maybe be a planet X after all exactly. Another idea
is that a lost giant planet was ejected from our
Solar System a long time ago, disrupting orbits on its
way out of our Solar System. So that would that
would explain why they all seem sort of skewed in
the same direction, because some like a massive planetary object
(25:11):
just came ripping through, pulling everybody out of place. And
then a final of reasonable theory is that back in
the stellar nursery days of our Solar System, the Sun's
fellow proto sons nudged everything out of whack okay, so
it could be sort of a relic of something that
happened in the past, kind of like the planet being
(25:31):
ejected or something moving by. So if I can come
back to Pluto for a second, I hope that for
one thing, the idea of the said nooids makes everyone
feel better about losing or potentially losing Pluto is a
full fledged planet, because ultimately, wouldn't you rather just drop
Pluto from the list as opposed to just adding all
these other additional things like no, you don't actually want
(25:53):
to memorize a bunch of saidnoids. Um. So also, you
didn't lose Pluto. Pluto's still there, It's still it's still
dwarf planet. You can still include it on the list.
Like people get way, people get people like to get
been out of shape over this when there's really nothing
to get bent out of shape over. There's a reason
Pluto is not considered a planet. It's in order to
make it consistent with the definition of a planet that
(26:14):
we use for all the other planets, and that means
that planets have to dominate their orbital area, They have
to gravitationally dominate their orbital area, and Pluto does not, right,
And if you just decide nope, we're gonna count Pluto,
then you you have to be open to letting other
things join the list as well. There is dwarf planets
and whatnot. So trust this is this is the best way,
(26:34):
that's the best approach forward. But again this comes back
to the question, all right, if there is let's let's
assume that that first theory is correct. If there is
a giant planet out there in our Solar system, uh,
and it's it's it's monkeying with the orbits of these
said nooids. Then why don't we know about it for sure? Why?
And did all these you know, the continual classification of exoplanets,
(26:57):
things as far away as sweeps a leathern which is
twenty seven thousand, seven hundred and ten light years away.
Why would we miss something so relatively close to home.
All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when
we come right back we will explore more about the
possibility of planet nine a K A planet X a
K a planet ten. But actually it's planet nine a
(27:18):
K a planet d M X. Thank alright, we're back, Robert.
Wasn't there an X themed wrestler or was he not
really X themed? I'm thinking of uh, he had an
X in his name? Well there was. There was an
expox wrestler, Yes, yeah, Sean Waltman, Yeah he's still around.
I believe there was a luchador doctor X because you know,
(27:40):
the X X looks so good on a mask. You've
got to you've got to roll that out eventually. It's
the coolest letter, I guess. So xbox is not like
X themed then no, not really no, nor does he
have any relation to planet X. So we're full on
talking about planet X now though this is confusing because yeah,
you mentioned that planet x X as the Roman numer
(28:00):
for ten, but this wouldn't be the tenth planet. This
would be the ninth planet would be the planet after
the eighth planet, Neptune Um, so it would really be
planet nine. And when actual astronomers an astrophysicists these days
talk about this planet, they don't usually call it planet X.
They call it planet nine. That's especially uh necessary, I think,
because the Internet is just overflowing with Planet X conspiracy
(28:22):
theories that I don't think we need to get into today.
But man, I if you just do a I don't
know if I recommend this there, do a YouTube search
for Planet X, and there is some apocalyptic, bonkers nonsense
out there. I think it's all about how Planet X
is coming to get us. Well, you know, yeah, we're,
like you said, we're not gonna really get into that today.
But the great thing is that all of the the
(28:45):
actual scientific ideas concerning a potential planet nine are far
more interesting. Oh yeah. So, so one of the things
that we should mention is that crucial for the demotion
of Pluto was a Caltech researcher named Mike E. Brown,
a colleague of another astronomer named Constantine Batiguan. And for
several years now that these astronomers, Constantine Patigan and Mike Brown,
(29:09):
have been talking about the possibility that they suspect that
there is an object out there beyond Neptune, out there
in the dark shepherd ng the trans Neptuneyan objects we've
been talking about, so that they are aligned in roughly
the same direction, and they're aligned across multiple axes, by
the way, So that's kind of interesting. Like if you
look at all of their orbits from the north pole
(29:31):
looking down, they're all lined up in this one weird direction,
as if something's pulling them all in the same place.
A giant blind shepherd in the darkness. What was the
name of the Cyclops in the Odyssey and does he
have an astronomical body named after him? Probably so, but
(29:51):
he's probably already taken. Polyphemus. I don't know it's Polyphemus
up for grabs. I don't know of anything called Polyphemus.
I just okay. I just did a Google search and
the only thing that came up was that somebody wanted
to name a moon of Neptune Polyphemus, but I don't
think they did. All right, Well, well, maybe we can
keep that one clear just in case, because I think
that would be that would be a really awesome name.
(30:13):
For one of these planets if I can have any
say so. So, when the aliens from that planet contact
us and they say help, someone's attacking me, and we
radio back and say who's attacking me? And they say, no,
one is attacking me, you can know they've been tricked
by a cosmic Odysseus told them his name was no One.
Say so, Disseas is the worst such a trickster. All right, Well,
I've derailed us a little bit here. Let's get back
(30:34):
to this idea of planet nine the blind, a potential
blind shepherd of the of these distant objects. All right, yeah,
we'll bring it back. So one thing I should mention
is that I actually listened to an interesting interview with
the Caltech astronomer and a professor of planetary science is
Constantine Batiguan and Uh and and so this this shed
some light on what he was thinking. Essentially, Uh, Constantine
(30:56):
Batiguan and Uh and Mikey Brown have been doing research
a show there is possible there is a way of
explaining some of the strange coincidences that we see in
the structure of the Outer Solar System and the structure
of these like saidnoids, hyper belt objects, these objects that
are way out there. Then when we track their orbits,
(31:16):
they seem to line up in this bizarre way where
they're all sort of pointing in the same direction at
one end at their parahelion, they're all like it's like
they're they're just lining up. And then also a strange
thing is that they're not only lining up in that dimension,
but if you like look directly at the solar plane
instead of down on it, they're all sort of elevated.
(31:36):
They're tipped up across the solar plane in a fairly
consistent or at least close to consistent way. And that's
really odd, Like Fatiguan talks about how that really wouldn't
be something you'd expect to see just by chance. So
the idea here is that what if something has pushed
them there. It's like, why are all the sheep standing
in this area? Well, maybe it's because the the the
(31:58):
shepherd dog or the wolf is standing over here, right,
And so the problem is we don't know exactly where
to look for this object if it is out there.
So lavery A could say, hey, you know, I think
I know where Neptune is. I'm going to give you
within one degree of of where to look, and of
course when they look forward, they found it with the telescope.
(32:19):
You can't quite do the same thing with this planet nine,
because even the people who think it exists, they're inferring
it from its influence on objects who have orbital periods
of like ten thousand years or something, so it takes
them so long to go around. So we are sort
of lacking in data to to get the full arc
to pinpoint exactly where the planet would be to cause
(32:41):
what we see. But constantin Batigan thinks that right now,
the best place to look for this planet is probably
at an average distance of somewhere around five hundred astronomical units.
So yeah, five hundred times the distance between the Earth
and the Sun. And so for comparison, you know Earth
is one Mars is one point five a U, Jupiter
(33:02):
is five point to Neptune is about thirty a U.
So that's starting to get way out there. But the
distance from Neptune to the ninth planet would be gigantic.
It would be many times the distance from the Sun
to Neptune. So it's way way out there in the dark.
The best estimates say that it would probably have a
roughly ten thousand year orbit. And also it would probably
(33:23):
have a very elliptical orbit compared to the inner planets.
Like the interplanets are elliptical, but they're pretty close to circular.
This planet would be more like these these objects we've
been talking about, these Kuiper Belt objects and setnoids that
have these long ovals, but not quite as long as
the setnoid. No longer, but not quite that long. So
(33:45):
we've got good reasons to think that there's something out
there with mass. There. There could be another large planet
out there with mass that's causing these objects that we
can see to behave in the way they do. But
we don't know much about this object itself, right because
all all we have to go on is what its
mass would have to be and roughly what its orbit
is to cause the effects we're seeing, we can't we
(34:07):
haven't been able to look at it. We don't know
exactly for sure what it would be made of, exactly
how big it would be. Um the the estimates i've
seen tend to think that it's going to be bigger
than Earth, but it would be sort of like a
an icy super Earth with a with an atmosphere kind
of like the gas giants and an upper atmosphere like
Neptune or something, but with an icy core, maybe roughly
(34:30):
five earth masses. I've also seen an older estimate that
was more like roughly ten earth masses. I don't know
if it's been if those represent different points of view,
or if it's been scaled down since then, but the
more recent one I saw from Batigan was five earth masses.
But as for the makeup, like the icy core with
the atmosphere on the outside, that's just something we have
to guess. We don't know for sure. And so with
(34:53):
an object with an orbit this long way out there
in the dark, obviously it probably would be possible for
us to see it with our telescopes if we know
where to look and what to look for. But it's
not going to be something that just shows up in
an obvious way. It's going to take like difficult analysis
of uh doing, you know, comparing photos of the night
(35:14):
sky with deep detail across different nights to see what moves.
And part of the problem is there's a lot of
stuff out there, a lot of things move, and so
like if you take a super high res photograph with
great magnification of a patch of the sky across a
few different nights and then see what moves there. You
might get tons of hits, maybe thousands of hits, and
(35:34):
then you got to look at those and say, Okay,
is this a new is this an Kuiper Belt object
we know about? Is this a Main Belt asteroid we
know about? Is this a new Kuiper Belt or Main
Belt object that we did that we didn't know about,
or is this maybe a planet that we should be
looking for right? Because I mean it's you see this
happen from time to time where it's they'll think that
new objects has been discovered, but it's actually an object
(35:56):
that has already been charted. So there's duplication that can
take place. Yeah, and so one of the things that
we can do to help figure out where we should
look is to rule out certain areas of the sky.
And that's something that Batigan has been talking about doing.
Is you can say, Okay, there's no point in looking
for the planet here. You know it wouldn't be here.
There's no point looking for it here. We know it
(36:16):
wouldn't be here. And then also you can use other
data to infer places where it probably shouldn't be for example,
we know that it's uh, probably not in in a
certain sector because if it were, it may it probably
would have affected the movements in a detectable way of
the Cassini spacecraft when Cassini was in orbit around Saturn.
(36:38):
So that tells us probably it's not really close to
its parahelion right now, right, it's not close enough to
be having an effect on the inner planet's. It's probably
somewhere a little bit further out if it exists. So
to come back to my my beach house, okay metaphor
from earlier, Uh, it's like you they're the rooms that
you can see, and you can you can look to
(36:59):
them from where you are and see there is no
mystery stranger in that room. There are rooms where you
would be able to detect maybe there's a you know,
they're right beneath it, and you would be able to
hear them surely if they were creaking around up there.
But there are other rooms that you just you don't
know at this point. Yeah, and so the question of
whether there is actually a planet nine out there it
does remain unsolved, though Constantine Batiguan seems very confident and
(37:23):
the interview I listened to. You know, the host asked him,
how confident are you that this thing is out there?
And he's like, well, I used to say I was
six trillion percent confident um, But then he said, actually,
you can calculate a good confidence interval by saying, what's
the probability as far as we know that all of
these Kuiper Belt objects would have their orbits line up
(37:45):
the same way like this by chance without some big
massive object out there to shepherd them into these orbits.
And according to him, the chance of this happening by
coincidence is zero point two percent. So by subtraction, he
says he's ninety nine point eight percent confident that planet
nine exists. So that's very confident. I'm sure plenty of
(38:06):
other astronomers wouldn't be that level of confident. But it's
all inspiring to even think about the possibility that there's this, this,
this additional planet out there in our own Solar system
and our own relatively local neck of the cosmic woods,
and we just merely suspect that it's there, that it's
out there roaming up through the darkness. Well, I mean,
(38:28):
this is a this is a great sort of science
hunt game to play, right, Uh, you know, you you
have to use the laws of physics as you know
them and try to figure out what's another way we
could get data that nobody's thought of before. And so
like the idea of using the perturbations of the movement
of a spacecraft. That's that's a smart way to look
for new data that might not have appeared to you otherwise. Um.
(38:51):
And so this is really cool, but at the same time,
I'm sure really frustrating, especially if you're like pretty confident
that you think, yeah, we really know it's probably to
be out there, because nobody has discovered a planet in
the Solar System arguably since either Clyde Tombo in the
nineteen thirties or since Lavery a and uh and uh
(39:11):
McAdams or I think McAdams was the other guy who
discovered it in the eighteen forties. I mean, that's been
a long time. Yeah, totally, because again we've all grown
up with this map of the Solar System in our
our heads. And uh, and you kind of you, I don't,
I don't remember being taught. Hey, this is all subject
to change, but but clearly it is. Well, you would
(39:31):
think that if there is a Planet nine out there
to be discovered. It's also probably going to be the
last one we're going to discover, because there's there's only
a limited range of space where planets could actually be
without without violating what else we know about space. Right,
It couldn't be closer than where we're thinking this planet is,
because otherwise we would interfere with the inner planets and
(39:53):
we would know about it. It couldn't really be farther
away than where we're thinking this thing is, or else
it probably would have been like stripped away by a
passing star as we move through the galaxy, right, because
it's still needs to be under the power of our Son,
within the thrall of our Son to be considered part
of our Solar System. And that's the whole point. Yeah,
(40:15):
So there's not like opportunities to just discover unlimited more
planets in the Solar System. The Solar System doesn't go
on forever. Eventually the domain of gravitational dominance of our
Son ends and other stars become more powerful in their
in their gravitational influence. So so there's only so much
space where there could be more planets, and it looks
like if we discover one more planet out there. That's
(40:38):
that's probably about it. I don't know, maybe there could
be one, but it's not like you know that we're
gonna find ten more planets. Yeah, and certainly nothing you know,
large like that. So yeah, it's a tantalizing mystery. I
love the idea that there's still mysteries about our Solar System,
not just space in general, but local mysteries, mysteries inside
the house, right right. And of course that's not to
(41:00):
gloss over the many, you know, unsolved problems related to
each individual planet. I mean just just every just about
every object in our Solar system, there's something about it
we're still trying to figure out. And uh, and and
that's just dealing with the problems that we know about.
That's the unknowns that were aware of. Personally, I'm excited.
I hope they discover another planet in our lifetime. That
(41:22):
would be really cool. That would that would be cool.
And it seems like now there's I don't it's not
a lock. I wouldn't. I don't know if i'd go
to NCENT, but it seems like there's pretty good evidence. Yeah,
and then then what will we name it? I like
your polyphemous idea the Blind Shepherd out there. Yeah, it's
a good name. Yeah, assuming nothing else has has has
snagged it already. Yeah, and assuming that it doesn't attempt
(41:45):
to space so Disseys to come along and screw everything up.
That's true. Alright, Well, we're going to close out this episode.
You know, we we didn't even get into any examples
from science fiction, though. I do believe in Doctor Who
the side Reman homeworld of Mandau's is both a ninth
planet as well as a former counter Earth's at once. Yeah,
(42:09):
I think it's two at once. I could I could
have that wrong. So I'd love to hear from from
our Who fans out there. I know we have some
WHO listeners out there listening to the show. You you
can set us right in this. Plus, there have to
be there have to be plenty of other science fiction
properties that have have utilized this idea of a mysterious
ninth or tenth planet out there in our solar system. Robert,
(42:30):
I think they're called uvoidsoids. Okay, Well, who Who voids
right in about it, uh, and everybody else feel free
to write in as well. Uh. We're gonna hopefully come
back with more episodes in this series because there are
additional phantom planets, phantom objects UH that that line up
under the mission statement of of these episodes, So UH
(42:53):
look forward to that in the future. And in the meantime,
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(43:14):
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(43:38):
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(43:58):
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blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
(44:20):
how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and we're back or part two or is this part
two or does it kind of stand alone to a
large time. I think this one stands alone. Yeah. Okay,
(00:24):
So well, last time, if you were with us, in
the last episode, we were exploring what we were sort
of calling the lost Daughters of autun the planets that
once were thought to exist somewhere in the schlore system,
whether in ancient times or in recent centuries, but we
later found out probably never existed or definitely never existed
in some cases. So examples we talked about included Antikathon
(00:48):
and the Central Fire. What was the deal with that?
Oh wow, you just have to go back and listen
to the episode. But yeah, this complex notion where, um,
the Sun is not the center of the universe, the
Earth is not the center of the universe, but something
called the Central Fire is at the center, and Earth
is actually closer to the Central Fire than the Sun.
So it's you know, this sort of complex uh model
(01:11):
of the cosmos based on uh, you know, the best
observational data of the day of like ancient times, ancient Greece. Yeah,
combined with certain religious mythological ideas yea Pythagorean cosmology sort of.
But then also we talked about the scientific thinking that
(01:31):
led to the belief in such a thing as the
planet Vulcan, a planet believed to be inside the orbit
of Mercury, super close to the Sun, as was proposed
by Urban la Verier. And of course we also talked
about Phaeton, the the Phaeton or Phaeton the the best
subject of a Renaissance painting of all time. Yes, but
(01:53):
for the purposes of main purposes of our discussion, the
the idea that that they thought, well, the asteroid belt
maybe used to be planet, and maybe this is this
is what we would call that planet if it were
still a whole exactly right. So today we wanted to
carry this discussion forward to talk about other ideas about
planets that are thought to maybe exist somewhere in the
(02:13):
Solar System but haven't yet been confirmed. In the last episode,
all the planets that we talked about, we're we're pretty
sure now have never existed at any time. I mean,
with two of them were quite sure, but there are
still questions. For example, there has long been a question
about what lies at the furthest reaches we we talked about,
(02:33):
you know what happens when you go down as far
as you can into the Solar system, like the Sun,
is this pit this well where you go all the
way down? Are there are things that are hard to
see because they're so close to the Sun. When you
think about the opposite end, could there be things that
are hard for us to see because they're so far
And of course we have to realize how how confusing
(02:53):
this may seem at first, because it's easy to think
that we have our Solar system pretty figured out at
this point, right, I mean mostly if you're listening to this,
you probably grew up memorizing the planets Mercury, Venus, with Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.
And then there's the whole issue of Pluto, and some
of us get a little bit out of shape, right
when when someone tells us actually, Pluto isn't a full
(03:17):
fledged planet, it's more of a dwarf planet, etcetera. And uh,
you know when when maybe don't roll with change all
that well, but it's easy to think Okay, but that's it, right,
there's nothing new to discover in the Solar System, because meanwhile,
we are continually spotting new exo planets that are light
years upon light years away, like far distant reaches of
(03:38):
the observable universe. So if we're figuring that out, then
surely we've got everything squared away in our immediate neighborhood. Yeah,
it only makes sense that that's the way it should go, right,
Why are we seeing exo planets when there's still a
question of whether there could be a planet in our
own Solar system we don't know about. And unfortunately that's
just a side effect of the different ways we have
(04:00):
of detecting things. It actually may be much easier to
detect the presence of a planet orbiting a distant star
because you can definitely see that star, and you can
tell by certain things. You can tell by if the
star wobbles, if there are other gravitational influences on that star.
You can tell by the what's known as the transit method,
if something is passing in front of the star from
(04:22):
our perspective and causing it too dim. Yeah, I think
I was thinking about it this way. Um, I was
thinking of beach houses. Imagine you're staying in one beach house,
you know, sizeable beach house, and they tend to be
you know, with lots of lots of beds for multiple
families or groups to stay and at the same time,
so you're in one beach house and then you're adjacent
to another beach house and you you you gaze out
(04:45):
at the other beach house. You see some lights on,
and you ask yourself, I wonder if anyone is staying there,
and you observe it until you find definite signs that
there is an individual in that house, and then then
maybe you can count how many individuals are in that house.
But then if you have the same question about your
own beach house, well then you can. There are ways
to try and figure that out, but not the same
(05:08):
not the same ways, right. You might do a bit
of listening, you might do a bit of roaming around,
of rattling the curiously locked doors that go who knows where.
That's a really good analogy. I like that a lot.
And so by running around within our own house, we
have discovered, by say the early nineteen hundred, late eighteen hundreds,
(05:29):
early nineteen hundreds, we had discovered a lot of stuff.
We discovered eight planets at that point. The first six
planets Mercury, Venus, of course, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn
have been known about since ancient times. The ancient astronomers
with the naked eye could see them in the night
sky and charted their movements and all that. Then in
seventeen eighty one you had Uranus or Uranus. We still
(05:52):
have to decide which one we truly prefer. Uranus was
found by Sir William Herschel with a telescope. He wanted
to name it after King George, and fortunately that didn't happen. Uh.
Then Laveryer, the French astronomer, predicted the placement of Neptune
by the wobble in Uranus um and he he said,
I predict there's another planet here and you can find it.
(06:13):
And then they went and looked for it and they
did find it. And that was in the eighteen forties.
So we're up to seven planets at this point by
the eighteen forties. By the way, as long as we're
snickering at at the planetary name Uranus, I do want
to throw in to call back to an older episode
that I hope that one day someone writes a science
fiction tale in which a starship is headed towards Uranus
(06:36):
and it's called the Guya Bolga. That would be a
great ship title there. That is brilliant. That is absolutely brilliant.
Wait a minute, I think I said. Did I say
a minute ago that Neptune was the seventh planet? I
feel like I've got that ringing in my head for
some reason. If I said that, that's entirely wrong. Neptune
is the eighth planet. Obviously. Uh So, apologies if I misspoke.
If not, this is just maybe something we can edit out.
(06:58):
Sorry I had to say that before I forgot. But yes,
the guy balda that that should be the ship to Uranus.
Absolutely much more evocative and resident than Voyager two or
whatever they've previously used. But let's pull it back and
meet a guy. You ready to meet a guy, A
mustachio gentleman. Yes, okay, so it is time to meet
a fellow by the name of Perceval Lowell. And I
(07:19):
think we visited this guy on the podcast before. That
mustache does look familiar. So Perceval Lowell was born to
a wealthy, prominent family in Boston in eighteen fifty five.
The Lowell family. So he was brother of a Lawrence Lowell,
who was a lawyer who ended up becoming president of
Harvard University. He was also the brother I didn't realize
(07:40):
this until recently of the poet Amy Lowell, who I
guess is considered a modernist poet. She sometimes called an imagist. Um.
But I picked out one of her poems because it
had an image that seemed maybe a bit relevant to today. Um.
The poem is called Balls. I'm not going to quote
the whole thing, but she writes, throw the blue ball
above the little twigs of the tree tops, and cast
(08:02):
the yellow ball straight at the buzzing stars. All our
life is a flinging of colored balls to impossible distances.
I think the image there is that all our life
is a flinging of colored balls, like we're doing the flinging.
But you could also think of it is that everything
that human life is is being flung around on a
colored ball in the void of space. Yeah, that's that's
(08:23):
the whole human experience, just right there on the surface
of this weird ball among other weird balls. It's always
a weird thing to consider. I mean, I know Sagan
pointed that out about like the picture of the Earth.
When you take a picture of the Earth, everything human
there has ever been is in that picture. Yeah, that
pale blue dot that contains our beginning and may well
(08:45):
contain our end. But anyway, back to Amy's brother, Perceval,
so Perceval roll I think in his early days, I guess,
since he was sort of a man about town, except
town was like the whole world, and especially like the
eastern part of Asia. Like he traveled a lots inner
national fleneur maybe um and he he traveled through the
eighteen eighties and the eighteen nineties, and at one point
(09:06):
became Foreign Secretary to the Korean Special Mission to the
United States. But then later in the eighteen nineties, Percival
Lowell became more and more fascinated with astronomy, particularly with
the planet Mars. And there was something interesting going on
in the late eighteen hundreds with the planet Mars. There
was this Italian astronomer named Giovanni Chaparelli who had been
(09:28):
studying the planet Mars through a telescope, and he perceived
what looked to him like a series of lines on
the surface of the planet that he in eighteen seventy
seven called cannally, an Italian word meaning channels. But apparently
these canally were taken by some English speaking audiences to
be canals, kind of a false cognate inference, as in
(09:51):
canals like in Venice, artificial structures made by intelligent tool
using creatures like us. And this idea kind of became
a sensation, right, Yeah, this, this had a tremendous effect
on on the way we perceived the planet Mars. I mean,
its effects are still felt today and the way we
think about Mars despite everything that we've learned since then. Yeah, Like,
(10:12):
why how come when we talk about aliens that go
to is to talk about Martians? Especially in the early
twentieth centuries, it was always Martians And when't Venusians or
anything like that. I mean, occasionally Venusians would pop up,
but it's not Santa Claus versus the Venusians. It's Santa
Claus versus the Martians. Yeah, or in War of the World,
you know why why the Martians Martian threat? Exactly? So,
(10:34):
the the idea of alien canals on Mars really got personal.
Lowell's gears cranking, and he decided to turn his attention
and his wealth and his resources to astronomy in the
eighteen nineties, and in doing this he founded the Lowell
Observatory and Flagstaff, Arizona, still there today. Yeah, and Flagstaff
(10:54):
is certainly a great place to gaze at the stars,
and just a cool place in general. I like Flagstaff
so personal. Lowell became a passionate defender of the idea
that there was or had been, intelligent civilization on Mars.
And he put this theory forward in a bunch of
published writings, using observations from the Lowell Observatory to back
(11:14):
up his argument. And so I want to quote from
his nineteen sixteen New York Times obituary with a few abridgements.
The author rights quote. The great controversy among astronomers, in
which he played a leading part, began in nineteen oh
seven after his announcement that the observations made by his
astronomical station proved that Mars was inhabited. Professor Lowell had
(11:36):
put the theory forward tentatively as early as eighteen. Many
imminent astronomers in this country in Europe accepted his conclusions
of nineteen o seven as unassailable. Others were skeptical Professor
Lowell's theory begins with the demonstration that the primary requisites
for human life exists on the planet water, heat, and atmosphere.
(11:56):
His positive proof of the existence of human life on
Mars is the network of lines which marks certain areas
of the planet's face, indicating the digging of artificial canals,
which would require an intelligence and engineering skill as great
or greater than possessed by the inhabitants of this Earth.
So I think he's making a few jumps here, Yes, yeah,
(12:17):
I mean the main jump, of course is that is
that there are no such canals. And uh, and the
more we looked at Mars, and then ultimately as we
began to to send probes to the Red planet, it
became increasingly clear that there are absolutely no canals. Yeah,
when we we got photos of Mars from a probe
in in the nineteen seventies which showed yeah, definitely not
(12:40):
nothing there, right and and uh, and you know we
talked about this before in the show. And you know,
dealing with early observations, there is a there's more room
to see things that are not there, especially if you
don't have the ability to really cat do any photography
at all. It's so it's very observational and then very
and then very easy to maybe think you see something
(13:02):
or misremember something you've seen, or or in fact, the
more you look at it see faint signs of the
thing you want to see. Yeah, there's so much interesting
stuff in the history of astronomy about things people said
they saw during the days of earlier optical telescopes without
modern instruments and modern uh telephotography, where like the ash
(13:25):
and Light remember that episode, and the planet Vulcan itself.
You know that wasn't just predicted, like people said they
saw the planet Vulcan up there by the sun during
an eclipse. Who knows what they actually saw, but clearly
the process of astronomical observation was was much cruder back then.
But Little's Little's argument is kind of funny. So he
says astronomers can see white surfaces on the poles of Mars, right,
(13:49):
and he says that these are ice caps, and in
a way that he's correct about that there are ice
caps on Mars, but he said they would melt and
shrink in summer and then freeze and grow larger again
in winter. And so he observed that the Martian spring
came and the ice melted, and at that point the
dark lines or the canals would grow darker quote, even
showing straight black lines criss crossed over the surface and
(14:12):
over the surface of the orange ochre areas uh and
that he said, these dark lines would disappear again in
the Martian autumn. And he concluded from this that the
darkened areas around the canals were flourishing with plant life
bearing leaves and grasses during the summer, which had died
away again in the winter when the water froze up
and became scarce. And from this he argued that Mars
(14:34):
must have been a very parched planet where water is
in high demand, which meant that the people who lived
there would have had to make very careful use of
a highly limited water supply, or else quote would find
themselves at last face to face with the relentlessness of
a scarcity of water, constantly growing greater, until at last
they would all die of thirst, either directly or indirectly,
(14:55):
for either they themselves would not have water enough to drink,
or the plants or animals which constituted their diet would
perish for lack of it. An alternative of small choice
to them unless they were conventionally particular as to their
mode of death. So Lowell concluded that they had to
build canals on Mars, that only irrigation on a vast
scale could prevent the Martians from dying from a lack
(15:18):
of water, and thus the proof of the existence of
civilization on the surface of Mars. Well, it's a fun argument,
and I love the world building of it. If you know,
if it were just purely science fiction, that that would
be marvelous. But as we've already touched on, evidence did
not support this theory. Yeah, and there were skeptics at
the time. We should say it wasn't like everybody believed
(15:38):
this until we had a Mars probe, like take photos
of the surface from up close. Right, Though, certainly one
of these possibilities is far more exciting than the other.
So so you can understand why that one would be
the one that the idea of canals on Mars would
be Uh, the idea that would show up in more
headlines and would and would capture the collective imagination, right uh.
And and Lowell's career of influential, controversial, and sometimes incorrect
(16:02):
observations and hypotheses did not in there there was an
interesting thing I came across where Lowell also believed that
once while observing the planet Venus, he saw quote spokes
radiating from a hub within the planet Venus. But in
a two thousand three paper by Sheehann and Dobbins Uh,
the authors argued that what actually probably happened here is
(16:22):
that because of the way he manipulated the telescope to
look at Venus, he had accidentally converted it into a
crude opthalmoscope, which would have been showing him images of
the blood vessels within his own eyeball. Oh my goodness.
And he included an image and in our notes here
for me to look at here, and it does line
up rather well with the arteries of the eye. Yeah,
(16:43):
But it doesn't stop there either. So Lowell was also
in the planet predicting business. And we'll discuss his planet
predictions when we get back from a break. Thank thank alright,
we're back. So thus far we've talked about Lowell's thoughts
concerning um Mars, a known planet, but now we're gonna
get into the unknown. We get intune into the study
(17:05):
and the prediction of of of hypothetical planets. Yeah, and
remember how the eighth planet Neptune had been discovered. Again,
uh Laveryer looked at the orbit of Uranus and said, Okay,
by the way it's moving, we can tell something is
influencing it. It's not moving based on what our predictions
should be. So what if we pose it another another
(17:27):
object out there of a certain mass and a certain position,
then we could explain why Uranus moves the way it does.
And so he posited Neptune, and it turned out Neptune
was there. He was correct, and so this is a
fantastically useful and successful prediction based on the laws of physics.
So in the early years of the twentieth century, after
studying the orbits of the outer gas giants like Uranus
(17:50):
and Neptune, Lowell tried to do the same thing. He
concluded that there was another planet yet to be found
based on those orbits, something out there is messing with
Uranus and Neptune. And yet again, like with the correct
prediction of Neptune and the incorrect prediction of Vulcan by
la Verier, this was on that basis, on the basis
of inferred gravitational influences on the orbits of these known objects,
(18:13):
so in nineteen o five or nineteen o six, Perceval
Lowell initiated a massive hunt for this ghost planet. The
project was initially called the Invariable Plane Search, and the
ghost planet was called Planet X. And this project went
on for many years. It proceeded in stops and starts
throughout several phases, even after Perceval Lowell himself actually passed
(18:35):
away in nineteen sixteen, so Perceval Lowell never got to
see how this project turned out, though he wrote books
about He wrote a book called I Think Like a
Memoir of the trans Neptunian Planet. But on February eighteenth,
nineteen thirty, fourteen years after Lowell's death, an astronomer at
Lowell Observatory named Clyde Tombo actually did discover a massive
(18:57):
object beyond Neptune with the help of the with the
help of a loaned sum of money that I think
they used to buy new instruments from personal Lowell's brother
who had been the head of Harvard and this object
was Pluto, though Pluto was not nearly as massive as
the planet that Lowell had predicted out there, and later
actually turned out more accurate measurements of the orbit and
massive Neptunes, such as by the voyage or two mission
(19:20):
basically obviated the need for a planet X to explain
our observation. So you actually looking at Uranus and Neptune,
there was no need to to infer a planet X.
So it seems there's just no planet out there right
now we can conclude there's no need to explain anything.
It's probably there's probably nothing. I mean, we have Pluto
to be sure. And uh and and again, like we
(19:40):
discussed earlier, you can go back and forth on exactly
how we should classify Pluto. But here's the thing. There's
no question that there are other objects in our solar
system beyond Pluto. Pluto is not the stop sign for
our solar system. There there's plenty of other objects out there. Yeah,
the solar system kind of has a shell of icy
(20:01):
debris floating around it. Yeah. And so it's not like
you you would get to Pluto and there would essentially
be a sign saying like last stop toll Alpha Centauri.
Uh No, there there's the possibility for other other things,
and we know for a fact that there are other things. First,
there's the general category of trans Neptuneian objects such as
the dwarf planet Eiris Uh between thirty seven point nine
(20:25):
and ninety seven point six astronomical units away from the Sun.
Is actually larger than Pluto by mass, though a little
smaller by volume. Oh and just quickly, an astronomical unit
is the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Correct. Yeah,
so Earth is one a U from the Sun, et cetera.
So U is is way up. It's way out there. Yeah.
(20:47):
Other dwarf planets include UH series, um Hamiya, and Makamaki.
And then consider the said noise. This is where it
really begins to get weird. These are trans Neptunian objects
with a parahelion. Again, this is a point of least
distance from the Sun of at least fifty a U.
(21:08):
So if they're closest to the Sun, they are still
beyond the Kuiper belt, which lies thirty to fifty AU
from the Sun. This is an asteroid belt like scattering
of leftover debris. And all three known you know, verified
said noise have really cool names. First of all, there's Sedna,
discovered in two thousand three, named for an Inuit sea goddess.
(21:29):
And that's where we get said noise, because when we
discovered earlier, it become a classification. And then there's two
thousand twelve vp H one one three a k A. Biden,
discovered in twelve and named for then Vice President of
the United States Joe Biden. So wow. And then I
wonder who is the person who has the most onion
(21:51):
articles written about them? Who also has an asteroid named
about not an asteroid, an object in space named after them?
Is it Biden? It might be Biden. And then the
third one of note here, discovered in twenty fifteen is
t G three seven. The t G stands for the Goblin.
The goblin, Yeah, the Cheddar Goblin. No, just the goblin.
(22:13):
I mean, if it's Cheddar and it's too far away,
it might be monster. So Seddon is the largest, the
Goblin is furthest away, and all of them have really
weird orbits, so their distance from the center of things
from our son varies greatly. And if you look at
a chart of their of their orbits, I really get
the sense of imagine, imagine a typical orbit that has
(22:35):
been stretched out like a rubber band. Yeah, so pretty
much all the planets I think have have elliptical orbits.
They're not perfectly circular, but the inner planets, their orbits
are pretty close to circular. There only a few percent
off from being circular. But these orbits are just massively
off from being circular. They are super stretched out ovals.
(22:58):
And one of the weird things I noticed in in
at least one of the pictures you've got here early
on Robert is that they almost kind of like look
like they're there. They're paraheliens, are kind of aligned almost
in the same direction. I wonder why that might be.
We'll come back to that. We'll come back, because that's
that's definitely leads to a few different mysteries here, uh
in additionally to having just weird orbits. Again, they are
(23:18):
so far away from from the Sun um of certainly
when you look at their their extremes, but even at
their parahliens are pretty extreme. The Goblin, for instance, has
an estimated orbital period what we can think of as
a year of thirty two thousand, one hundred and seventeen
point twenty nine earth years. That's how long it takes
for for the Goblin to go around the Sun. And
(23:42):
to put that in context, a year on Pluto is
two hundred forty eight earth years. That's how long it
takes Pluto to go around the Sun. And this thing
is that much further away. The goblins distance from the
Sun ranges from sixty five point one a U to
one thousand, nine hundred and fifty five A Wow. That
is crazy far away. Yeah, and their additional sedenoid candidates
(24:04):
and suspected to be many more. We're talking eighty to
ninety of these critters, and they're distant and weird. Orbits
can't be fully explained by the influences of known Solar
System objects either. So for starters, they're too far from
the Sun to be influenced by the gas giants, and
they're too close to the Sun to be influenced by
(24:28):
other distant stars. So something else is influencing them. But
what so, there are a few reasonable candidates to consider here. Uh.
The big one, the main one that we're most interested
here with is uh that there might be an undiscovered
giant planet comparable to Uranus or Neptune still orbiting our
Sun somewhere out there in the dark. So there could
(24:50):
maybe be a planet X after all exactly. Another idea
is that a lost giant planet was ejected from our
Solar System a long time ago, disrupting orbits on its
way out of our Solar System. So that would that
would explain why they all seem sort of skewed in
the same direction, because some like a massive planetary object
(25:11):
just came ripping through, pulling everybody out of place. And
then a final of reasonable theory is that back in
the stellar nursery days of our Solar System, the Sun's
fellow proto sons nudged everything out of whack okay, so
it could be sort of a relic of something that
happened in the past, kind of like the planet being
(25:31):
ejected or something moving by. So if I can come
back to Pluto for a second, I hope that for
one thing, the idea of the said nooids makes everyone
feel better about losing or potentially losing Pluto is a
full fledged planet, because ultimately, wouldn't you rather just drop
Pluto from the list as opposed to just adding all
these other additional things like no, you don't actually want
(25:53):
to memorize a bunch of saidnoids. Um. So also, you
didn't lose Pluto. Pluto's still there, It's still it's still
dwarf planet. You can still include it on the list.
Like people get way, people get people like to get
been out of shape over this when there's really nothing
to get bent out of shape over. There's a reason
Pluto is not considered a planet. It's in order to
make it consistent with the definition of a planet that
(26:14):
we use for all the other planets, and that means
that planets have to dominate their orbital area, They have
to gravitationally dominate their orbital area, and Pluto does not, right,
And if you just decide nope, we're gonna count Pluto,
then you you have to be open to letting other
things join the list as well. There is dwarf planets
and whatnot. So trust this is this is the best way,
(26:34):
that's the best approach forward. But again this comes back
to the question, all right, if there is let's let's
assume that that first theory is correct. If there is
a giant planet out there in our Solar system, uh,
and it's it's it's monkeying with the orbits of these
said nooids. Then why don't we know about it for sure? Why?
And did all these you know, the continual classification of exoplanets,
(26:57):
things as far away as sweeps a leathern which is
twenty seven thousand, seven hundred and ten light years away.
Why would we miss something so relatively close to home.
All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when
we come right back we will explore more about the
possibility of planet nine a K A planet X a
K a planet ten. But actually it's planet nine a
(27:18):
K a planet d M X. Thank alright, we're back, Robert.
Wasn't there an X themed wrestler or was he not
really X themed? I'm thinking of uh, he had an
X in his name? Well there was. There was an
expox wrestler, Yes, yeah, Sean Waltman, Yeah he's still around.
I believe there was a luchador doctor X because you know,
(27:40):
the X X looks so good on a mask. You've
got to you've got to roll that out eventually. It's
the coolest letter, I guess. So xbox is not like
X themed then no, not really no, nor does he
have any relation to planet X. So we're full on
talking about planet X now though this is confusing because yeah,
you mentioned that planet x X as the Roman numer
(28:00):
for ten, but this wouldn't be the tenth planet. This
would be the ninth planet would be the planet after
the eighth planet, Neptune Um, so it would really be
planet nine. And when actual astronomers an astrophysicists these days
talk about this planet, they don't usually call it planet X.
They call it planet nine. That's especially uh necessary, I think,
because the Internet is just overflowing with Planet X conspiracy
(28:22):
theories that I don't think we need to get into today.
But man, I if you just do a I don't
know if I recommend this there, do a YouTube search
for Planet X, and there is some apocalyptic, bonkers nonsense
out there. I think it's all about how Planet X
is coming to get us. Well, you know, yeah, we're,
like you said, we're not gonna really get into that today.
But the great thing is that all of the the
(28:45):
actual scientific ideas concerning a potential planet nine are far
more interesting. Oh yeah. So, so one of the things
that we should mention is that crucial for the demotion
of Pluto was a Caltech researcher named Mike E. Brown,
a colleague of another astronomer named Constantine Batiguan. And for
several years now that these astronomers, Constantine Patigan and Mike Brown,
(29:09):
have been talking about the possibility that they suspect that
there is an object out there beyond Neptune, out there
in the dark shepherd ng the trans Neptuneyan objects we've
been talking about, so that they are aligned in roughly
the same direction, and they're aligned across multiple axes, by
the way, So that's kind of interesting. Like if you
look at all of their orbits from the north pole
(29:31):
looking down, they're all lined up in this one weird direction,
as if something's pulling them all in the same place.
A giant blind shepherd in the darkness. What was the
name of the Cyclops in the Odyssey and does he
have an astronomical body named after him? Probably so, but
(29:51):
he's probably already taken. Polyphemus. I don't know it's Polyphemus
up for grabs. I don't know of anything called Polyphemus.
I just okay. I just did a Google search and
the only thing that came up was that somebody wanted
to name a moon of Neptune Polyphemus, but I don't
think they did. All right, Well, well, maybe we can
keep that one clear just in case, because I think
that would be that would be a really awesome name.
(30:13):
For one of these planets if I can have any
say so. So, when the aliens from that planet contact
us and they say help, someone's attacking me, and we
radio back and say who's attacking me? And they say, no,
one is attacking me, you can know they've been tricked
by a cosmic Odysseus told them his name was no One.
Say so, Disseas is the worst such a trickster. All right, Well,
I've derailed us a little bit here. Let's get back
(30:34):
to this idea of planet nine the blind, a potential
blind shepherd of the of these distant objects. All right, yeah,
we'll bring it back. So one thing I should mention
is that I actually listened to an interesting interview with
the Caltech astronomer and a professor of planetary science is
Constantine Batiguan and Uh and and so this this shed
some light on what he was thinking. Essentially, Uh, Constantine
(30:56):
Batiguan and Uh and Mikey Brown have been doing research
a show there is possible there is a way of
explaining some of the strange coincidences that we see in
the structure of the Outer Solar System and the structure
of these like saidnoids, hyper belt objects, these objects that
are way out there. Then when we track their orbits,
(31:16):
they seem to line up in this bizarre way where
they're all sort of pointing in the same direction at
one end at their parahelion, they're all like it's like
they're they're just lining up. And then also a strange
thing is that they're not only lining up in that dimension,
but if you like look directly at the solar plane
instead of down on it, they're all sort of elevated.
(31:36):
They're tipped up across the solar plane in a fairly
consistent or at least close to consistent way. And that's
really odd, Like Fatiguan talks about how that really wouldn't
be something you'd expect to see just by chance. So
the idea here is that what if something has pushed
them there. It's like, why are all the sheep standing
in this area? Well, maybe it's because the the the
(31:58):
shepherd dog or the wolf is standing over here, right,
And so the problem is we don't know exactly where
to look for this object if it is out there.
So lavery A could say, hey, you know, I think
I know where Neptune is. I'm going to give you
within one degree of of where to look, and of
course when they look forward, they found it with the telescope.
(32:19):
You can't quite do the same thing with this planet nine,
because even the people who think it exists, they're inferring
it from its influence on objects who have orbital periods
of like ten thousand years or something, so it takes
them so long to go around. So we are sort
of lacking in data to to get the full arc
to pinpoint exactly where the planet would be to cause
(32:41):
what we see. But constantin Batigan thinks that right now,
the best place to look for this planet is probably
at an average distance of somewhere around five hundred astronomical units.
So yeah, five hundred times the distance between the Earth
and the Sun. And so for comparison, you know Earth
is one Mars is one point five a U, Jupiter
(33:02):
is five point to Neptune is about thirty a U.
So that's starting to get way out there. But the
distance from Neptune to the ninth planet would be gigantic.
It would be many times the distance from the Sun
to Neptune. So it's way way out there in the dark.
The best estimates say that it would probably have a
roughly ten thousand year orbit. And also it would probably
(33:23):
have a very elliptical orbit compared to the inner planets.
Like the interplanets are elliptical, but they're pretty close to circular.
This planet would be more like these these objects we've
been talking about, these Kuiper Belt objects and setnoids that
have these long ovals, but not quite as long as
the setnoid. No longer, but not quite that long. So
(33:45):
we've got good reasons to think that there's something out
there with mass. There. There could be another large planet
out there with mass that's causing these objects that we
can see to behave in the way they do. But
we don't know much about this object itself, right because
all all we have to go on is what its
mass would have to be and roughly what its orbit
is to cause the effects we're seeing, we can't we
(34:07):
haven't been able to look at it. We don't know
exactly for sure what it would be made of, exactly
how big it would be. Um the the estimates i've
seen tend to think that it's going to be bigger
than Earth, but it would be sort of like a
an icy super Earth with a with an atmosphere kind
of like the gas giants and an upper atmosphere like
Neptune or something, but with an icy core, maybe roughly
(34:30):
five earth masses. I've also seen an older estimate that
was more like roughly ten earth masses. I don't know
if it's been if those represent different points of view,
or if it's been scaled down since then, but the
more recent one I saw from Batigan was five earth masses.
But as for the makeup, like the icy core with
the atmosphere on the outside, that's just something we have
to guess. We don't know for sure. And so with
(34:53):
an object with an orbit this long way out there
in the dark, obviously it probably would be possible for
us to see it with our telescopes if we know
where to look and what to look for. But it's
not going to be something that just shows up in
an obvious way. It's going to take like difficult analysis
of uh doing, you know, comparing photos of the night
(35:14):
sky with deep detail across different nights to see what moves.
And part of the problem is there's a lot of
stuff out there, a lot of things move, and so
like if you take a super high res photograph with
great magnification of a patch of the sky across a
few different nights and then see what moves there. You
might get tons of hits, maybe thousands of hits, and
(35:34):
then you got to look at those and say, Okay,
is this a new is this an Kuiper Belt object
we know about? Is this a Main Belt asteroid we
know about? Is this a new Kuiper Belt or Main
Belt object that we did that we didn't know about,
or is this maybe a planet that we should be
looking for right? Because I mean it's you see this
happen from time to time where it's they'll think that
new objects has been discovered, but it's actually an object
(35:56):
that has already been charted. So there's duplication that can
take place. Yeah, and so one of the things that
we can do to help figure out where we should
look is to rule out certain areas of the sky.
And that's something that Batigan has been talking about doing.
Is you can say, Okay, there's no point in looking
for the planet here. You know it wouldn't be here.
There's no point looking for it here. We know it
(36:16):
wouldn't be here. And then also you can use other
data to infer places where it probably shouldn't be for example,
we know that it's uh, probably not in in a
certain sector because if it were, it may it probably
would have affected the movements in a detectable way of
the Cassini spacecraft when Cassini was in orbit around Saturn.
(36:38):
So that tells us probably it's not really close to
its parahelion right now, right, it's not close enough to
be having an effect on the inner planet's. It's probably
somewhere a little bit further out if it exists. So
to come back to my my beach house, okay metaphor
from earlier, Uh, it's like you they're the rooms that
you can see, and you can you can look to
(36:59):
them from where you are and see there is no
mystery stranger in that room. There are rooms where you
would be able to detect maybe there's a you know,
they're right beneath it, and you would be able to
hear them surely if they were creaking around up there.
But there are other rooms that you just you don't
know at this point. Yeah, and so the question of
whether there is actually a planet nine out there it
does remain unsolved, though Constantine Batiguan seems very confident and
(37:23):
the interview I listened to. You know, the host asked him,
how confident are you that this thing is out there?
And he's like, well, I used to say I was
six trillion percent confident um, But then he said, actually,
you can calculate a good confidence interval by saying, what's
the probability as far as we know that all of
these Kuiper Belt objects would have their orbits line up
(37:45):
the same way like this by chance without some big
massive object out there to shepherd them into these orbits.
And according to him, the chance of this happening by
coincidence is zero point two percent. So by subtraction, he
says he's ninety nine point eight percent confident that planet
nine exists. So that's very confident. I'm sure plenty of
(38:06):
other astronomers wouldn't be that level of confident. But it's
all inspiring to even think about the possibility that there's this, this,
this additional planet out there in our own Solar system
and our own relatively local neck of the cosmic woods,
and we just merely suspect that it's there, that it's
out there roaming up through the darkness. Well, I mean,
(38:28):
this is a this is a great sort of science
hunt game to play, right, Uh, you know, you you
have to use the laws of physics as you know
them and try to figure out what's another way we
could get data that nobody's thought of before. And so
like the idea of using the perturbations of the movement
of a spacecraft. That's that's a smart way to look
for new data that might not have appeared to you otherwise. Um.
(38:51):
And so this is really cool, but at the same time,
I'm sure really frustrating, especially if you're like pretty confident
that you think, yeah, we really know it's probably to
be out there, because nobody has discovered a planet in
the Solar System arguably since either Clyde Tombo in the
nineteen thirties or since Lavery a and uh and uh
(39:11):
McAdams or I think McAdams was the other guy who
discovered it in the eighteen forties. I mean, that's been
a long time. Yeah, totally, because again we've all grown
up with this map of the Solar System in our
our heads. And uh, and you kind of you, I don't,
I don't remember being taught. Hey, this is all subject
to change, but but clearly it is. Well, you would
(39:31):
think that if there is a Planet nine out there
to be discovered. It's also probably going to be the
last one we're going to discover, because there's there's only
a limited range of space where planets could actually be
without without violating what else we know about space. Right,
It couldn't be closer than where we're thinking this planet is,
because otherwise we would interfere with the inner planets and
(39:53):
we would know about it. It couldn't really be farther
away than where we're thinking this thing is, or else
it probably would have been like stripped away by a
passing star as we move through the galaxy, right, because
it's still needs to be under the power of our Son,
within the thrall of our Son to be considered part
of our Solar System. And that's the whole point. Yeah,
(40:15):
So there's not like opportunities to just discover unlimited more
planets in the Solar System. The Solar System doesn't go
on forever. Eventually the domain of gravitational dominance of our
Son ends and other stars become more powerful in their
in their gravitational influence. So so there's only so much
space where there could be more planets, and it looks
like if we discover one more planet out there. That's
(40:38):
that's probably about it. I don't know, maybe there could
be one, but it's not like you know that we're
gonna find ten more planets. Yeah, and certainly nothing you know,
large like that. So yeah, it's a tantalizing mystery. I
love the idea that there's still mysteries about our Solar System,
not just space in general, but local mysteries, mysteries inside
the house, right right. And of course that's not to
(41:00):
gloss over the many, you know, unsolved problems related to
each individual planet. I mean just just every just about
every object in our Solar system, there's something about it
we're still trying to figure out. And uh, and and
that's just dealing with the problems that we know about.
That's the unknowns that were aware of. Personally, I'm excited.
I hope they discover another planet in our lifetime. That
(41:22):
would be really cool. That would that would be cool.
And it seems like now there's I don't it's not
a lock. I wouldn't. I don't know if i'd go
to NCENT, but it seems like there's pretty good evidence. Yeah,
and then then what will we name it? I like
your polyphemous idea the Blind Shepherd out there. Yeah, it's
a good name. Yeah, assuming nothing else has has has
snagged it already. Yeah, and assuming that it doesn't attempt
(41:45):
to space so Disseys to come along and screw everything up.
That's true. Alright, Well, we're going to close out this episode.
You know, we we didn't even get into any examples
from science fiction, though. I do believe in Doctor Who
the side Reman homeworld of Mandau's is both a ninth
planet as well as a former counter Earth's at once. Yeah,
(42:09):
I think it's two at once. I could I could
have that wrong. So I'd love to hear from from
our Who fans out there. I know we have some
WHO listeners out there listening to the show. You you
can set us right in this. Plus, there have to
be there have to be plenty of other science fiction
properties that have have utilized this idea of a mysterious
ninth or tenth planet out there in our solar system. Robert,
(42:30):
I think they're called uvoidsoids. Okay, Well, who Who voids
right in about it, uh, and everybody else feel free
to write in as well. Uh. We're gonna hopefully come
back with more episodes in this series because there are
additional phantom planets, phantom objects UH that that line up
under the mission statement of of these episodes, So UH
(42:53):
look forward to that in the future. And in the meantime,
if you want to check out old episodes of Stuff
to Blow your Mind, head and over to stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. That's our mothership. That's where
we'll find all of them. You'll find links out to
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(43:14):
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It's an invention by invention exploration of human techno history. Absolutely,
(43:38):
are you not listening to Invention yet? If you like
this show, you'll probably like that one too, So we
really advise you go check it out subscribe anyway, huge
thanks to our wonderful audio producers Alex Williams and Try Harrison.
If you would like to get in touch with us
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(43:58):
Planet nine, or just to say hello or to let
us know you're a Hovoid, you can email us at
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(44:20):
how stuff works dot com.
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