April 19, 2012 • 21 mins
The Voyager probes continue their journey toward the edge of our solar system, but how much distance have they covered? In this episode, Julie and Robert wrestle with the scale of our solar system, from the atomic fires of our sun to the Ooort cloud.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and my name is Julie Douglas,
and we just came off of a week of grueling
video work in which we've created a really exciting product
called Stuff to Blow Your Kid's Mind. It wasn't that
(00:26):
grueling though, well I haven't me. I mean, it wasn't
like we were being forced whipped or anything. It was
a great experience. It was just we had to do
a lot of it in a very short time, and
we had to muddle through some concepts. They're a little
bit heavy, yeah, and my my brain only works well
with conversation and for a very short period of time
every day, so I had to really try and stretch
that time out to cover an entire eight hour periods. Well,
(00:47):
only that we had to become acts. Yes, a little
a little other thing, but anyway. We we have the
chance to talk about the skill of the universe in
one of our episodes for the a s F sponsor
or Stuff to Blow your Kids Mind, and we thought
that this would be an interesting fodder for you guys
that we could expand on a little bit. Yeah, the
video version is going to start off with a cool
(01:08):
little experiment that you can do at home to show
kids or even yourself. I mean, I really had a
ball doing the experiment because it helps me understand all
this stuff that's really so much larger than ourselves. It's
gonna start off with this experiment, and then we're gonna
go in and you're gonna see us float around in
space as we talk about all this stuff. But we
can only go into so much detail there, so this
is considered this a companion piece this episode in which
(01:29):
we discuss the subject of planetary scale and the scale
of our Solar system and a little more detail. Well,
we wanted to try to let kids know just how tiny, tiny,
tiny our Earth is, even though it seems immense, and
so we did sort of this, Uh, I guess you
could say like pantry experiment with a bunch of different
objects that you could find in your home to illustrate this. Right,
(01:52):
So the basic experiment boils down to you're gonna just
grab a few household items to illustrate exactly what the
sizes are. So, for instance, you would start off with Earth,
which is the size of a black peppercorn. Pretty small, right, Jupiter,
the largest planet in our Solar system, would be about
the size of like a gumball or a foosball. So
if you grab one of those and put it next
to a black peppercorn, that would be about the size.
(02:14):
Saturn would be as big as a hazel nut. You're
in this, A Neptune would be coffee veins, Venus would
be a green peppercorn, Mars and Mercury would be just
little pinheads. And then the Sun itself, how big would
that be? Oh? Well, how about a ten pound bowling ball? Yeah, boom.
We are hoping that that gives kids a really good
perspective of, like, again, how tiny the Earth is relative
(02:35):
to the other planets and to the Sun. And when
we talk about that green peppercorn Venus, that's just slightly
larger than the Earth. Just wanted to point that a
since you're like, well, peppercorns, what's up with that? And
what we talked about, which I think it's really interesting,
is okay? Like if that doesn't kind of root you
in an idea of these relative distances, let's talk about
what would happen if we were to take a walk
(02:57):
across the Earth, and then we are about to take
a walk across us for some what might we expect
in those journeys. Well, let's see, the average human being
walks roughly three miles per hour. The circumference of the
Earth is about twenty four thousand, so it would take
you about three days to walk all that that that
that's doable, right, Well, I mean you know, well, and
(03:20):
you also have to have a continuous strip of land
or bridge and which to walk. So it's a thought experiment.
Say like cyborg col Julie could probably do this, right, Like,
I guess, but where cybar Julie. Now, She's never here,
she's being built. Rather, my parts are being built, the
parts that don't need to digest anything and just can
keep walking on and on. But okay, so if you're
(03:42):
going to try to make the same journey around the sun,
what would be facing you is two point seven million miles,
which would take you more than a century to walk. Yeah,
basically about a hundred and two years and some change.
So that definitely that's even something that Cyborg Julie would
have a problem with, I think unless you really pimped
out or metal skin. Yeah, yeah, that's just a couple
of years away. That's like a total nano. This was
(04:05):
interesting to us because we started to say we we
really take all of these distances for granted, the fact
that we even have this knowledge, and you know, we
can look back up the giants of science who began
to get an inkling of just how big our universe is. Yeah,
because the like the bowling ball and the peppercorn and
all that, you can build a thousand yard model with
that where you space them out. And I'll throw some
(04:26):
links to this experiment up on the blog posted accompanies
this episode if you want to try it for real
at home. But if you have a thousand yards, you
can put that bowling ball at one end, and you
can string the planets out at appropriate distances, and you
have a scale model of the Solar system which would
spread out to what about half a mile. Let's imagine
that you are Johannes Kepler, right, your sixteenth century German
(04:48):
mathematician and astronomer. We have discussed him a couple of
times here in the podcast. Yeah, because because the thing is,
we talk about these distances and then you ask, well,
how do we know that, and how is it possible
that we've we've more or less known it for centuries.
Kepler looked at the solar system in the same way
we might look at a race track. All Right, If
you've been to a race track, you know that you
have these inner lanes and then you have progressively outer lanes.
(05:10):
So the distance around that inner lane is less than
the distance around that outer lane. Right, That's why you
always staggered runners, right, But if you weren't to stagger him,
if everybody started at the same time, you'd have less
distance to cover if you're on the inner ring, right,
And if everyone was traveling at the same speed, and
the closer you were to the middle of that race track,
the shorter your trip would be. So Kepler looked out
(05:31):
at the planets and he clocked the time it took
for them to rotate around the Sun and use that
termine exactly how far from the Sun they were. And
that's the breakthrough he had after he went to a
dog race. Right, Yeah, he's able to figure out stuff
that like Mars is one point five times farther from
the Sun than Earth. Right, So he couldn't exactly give
exact measurements in kilometers, but he could figure out the
(05:52):
order of the planets. And for example, we just said
about Mars being farther from the Sun than the Earth.
Then there comes along this guy by the name of
Giovanni Cassini century whereas Johanna s Kepler was that a
century earlier. Yeah, and he is also an astronomer, and
he takes this idea of parallax and he applies it
(06:13):
to the universe. But before we talk about how he
did that, we'll just explain this parallax method, which is
super easy. You just put a finger up and close
one eye and then open the other eye closed and
shift between them. And it appears that your fingers just
has a slight shift to it. When you do that, right,
it appears to jump from the side of the other
(06:34):
back and forth. That you staggered the blinking. Yeah, and
this is because your eyes are separated from each other
by distance of a few inches, so each eye sees
the finger in front of you from a slightly different angle. Now,
you can't really do that with a star or a
planet in the sky. So what good old Giovanni Gazzini
does here is that he says, well, all right, what
have I had one eye here in Paris and I
(06:55):
had another eye in South America, and then I looked
to the heavens right right, So I mean this is
what gave him a baseline, the same parallax right that
your eyes have about those interests between of several thousand kilometers,
and then using geometry, he was able to calculate a
distance from Mars that is only seven percent off today's
more precise measurements, which is pretty incredible because it's kind
(07:16):
of I think about it, it's like, well, what would
you do today? Oh, I had this whole right through
about you know, this parallax method. What if you applied
it to two different geographic points here on Earth to
try to figure out the immensity of the universe. If
today you have a satellite or space probe named after you,
you were pretty dope. I mean you you had it
going on in the brains department and the cosmic mechanics.
(07:38):
You did the leg work for what we have today,
right in terms of our understanding of the universe and
even our more precise measurements like radar, which is what
we used to actually figure out a lot of the distances. Yeah,
radar is pretty simple. You send these waves out, they
bounce off of another planet. They come back, we know
how fast the waves travel, so we time that journey
and then we're able to see exactly how far those
(08:00):
waves travel. Right, And when you're thinking about radio signals,
beaming those back to Earth and that that can be time.
And if that seems weird, just remember that radar is
essentially microwave electromagnetic radiation, and microwaves fall under the radio spectrum.
And so since electromagnetic creation in all of its forms
is light, we know that radar travels at the speed
(08:22):
of light and can measure it. All right, Well, let's
take a quick break and when we come back, we're
gonna start talking about Voyager a little bit. Yeah, and
we're going to talk about breaking through to the other
side into interstellar space. All right, we're back. So Voyager,
just to rehash back in, we launched a Voyager of
(08:44):
one and Voyager two out into space to explore other
planets and to beam information about these planets in our
Solar System back to Earth. And they continue to travel
and we continue to keep in touch with them, and
we're not as close as we used to be. Uh,
you know, they don't they don't come over for dinner
as often and billions. It's going on there and they're
up to interesting things. Well, you know, they again they
(09:05):
gathered all that wonderful data for us and boomed it
back to us, and they are on a new tour
of sorts into interstellar space. At least that's what we
think any day now up until about two years from now,
that this is going to happen. And the reason we
know this is because they are again collecting data, particularly
about the solar winds that we know are present in
(09:27):
our Solar system. And what they found, researchers found this
actually last spring, is that the solar winds completely died down.
And at first they thought this was anomally because these
are the sort of particles that were coming at the
probe right, But then they realized that no, that they
are actually entering the helio pause. And you think helio pause,
do you think you know? A son and then a
(09:48):
quick stop before you start again. This is the outermost
bubble the surrounding the Solar system. They're at the cusp
of it. I like to think of it in terms
of imagine the Sun is a camp fire and the
planets are more or less huddled around this camp fire
for warmth and energy and light, and the farther you
walk away from that camp fire, the darker it gets,
(10:09):
the colder it gets. Until you actually walk into the darkness,
you've passed that point where the light from the fire
and the heat from the fire ceases to be a
commanding factor the right. So voyagers essentially passing out through
this darkness. And again to talk about the speeds, they
had been going something like a hundred and fifty thousand
miles per hour, that's what the solar winds were blowing on.
(10:32):
They just stopped, period. I mean, that's really traumatic. Voyager
one is both the fastest moving and the most distant
man made object. Yeah, which is incredible that again it's beaming,
even the fact that the solar winds completely died down.
So researchers found that the speed of the charge particles
hitting Voyagers outward face matched the spacecraft's own speed. And
that's what you're talking about, We're talking about that camp
(10:52):
fire kind of dying out, because that suggests that the
probe has bumped up against pressure from the interstellar magnetic field,
the region between the stars right right outside of our
solar system. So again that's an indication that less and
less of the Sun's influence is apparent, and that the
spacecraft is actually entering new territory. So what do we
have going on in the outer limits of our solar system?
(11:16):
This is an interesting thing to mention too. We talked
about the magnetic field. In June of last year. It
was discovered that the time the spacecraft was moving through
what pop Side described in its article Voyager one might
leave the Solar System any day now, a foamy froth
of magnetic bubbles, which is a bizarre phenomenon that results
from the criss crossing and rejoining of magnetic field lines
(11:38):
at the edge of the Solar system. So what is
beyond that? Well, there are two things that interest us here,
and one is the Kuiper Belt, and this is a
disc shaped region of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune,
billions of kilometers from our son. Yeah, it's thought to
be sort of like leftover material from the formation of
our solar system. It's still within our solar system. In fact,
(12:01):
it contains Pluto, which is the largest object in the
Kuiper Belt, and the Copper Belt is also leaved to
be the source for short period commets. Those are comments
that take about less than two hundred years to orbit. Now,
if you go out even farther, you encounter something called
the Orc Cloud, which is also thought to be home
to a number of commets as well. And this is
an immense spherical cloud surrounding the planetary system, thought to
(12:24):
extend approximately three light years and is about thirty trillion
kilometers from the Sun. This is speculative, but it's also
thought that the Orc Cloud may account for a significant
fraction of the mass in the Solar System, perhaps as
much or even more than the planet Jupiter. So that
much mass just spread out. Yeah, again, this is a theory.
This idea that the Orc Cloud is sort of like
(12:45):
a thick bubble that surrounds the entire Solar System, reaching
about halfway from the Sun to the next nearest star.
And there's also this idea that it intersects with the
Kuiper Belt. This is the cosmic riff raff that lives
on the margins of planetary society. Yeah, including a long
period comments. Again, this is the theory of the source
of those Yeah, yeah, big time drifters. But I think
(13:08):
what's so tantalizing about this idea of voyager leaving our
solar system and going into into stellar space. Is that
it is collecting all of this data and changing the
way that we are viewing how the universe works and
challenging some of our theories. So will we gather more
data about the Orc cloud, will we say, yes, this
this thing actually exists, and once it does go into
(13:30):
interstellar space and is under the influence of other sons again,
who knows, you know, sort of time period we're looking
at In terms of that, of course, how is that
going to again change our understanding of our relative place
here on Earth and the universe around us. Well, for starters,
if we were to aim Voyager one at Alpha Centauri,
(13:53):
he could make it there in about seventy tho years
and yeah, so probably not in our time in terms
of another sun like major influence. But what about the
space in between? Right? Yeah, but I've also read that
Voyager one is more like it's not these are Voyger
one and Voyger two are not really aimed at any
interstellar destinations. But Voyager one is roughly headed towards the
(14:17):
constellation off a Ucas. So in the year forty thousand,
two hundred and seventy two, a D Voyager one will
come within one point seven light years of an obscure
star in the constellation or some a minor the Little
Bear or the Little Dipper called a C plus seventy
nine three eighty eight. And then voyager To it's estimated
(14:39):
that in about forty thousand years it will come within
about one point seven light years of a star called
ross to forty eight, a small star in the constellation
of Andromeda. So these are colossal numbers, and they give
you just a little more insight into this the colossal
scale of the universe beyond our Solar system, which is
ultimately just as puny punior in the grand scheme of things,
(15:01):
and our Earth is within our own solar system. Well,
and I think just even even the bits of information
that have come back, like what's happening at the edge
of the Solar system, these magnetic bubbles, this now brings
into question, well, what are these magnetic bubbles doing anyway,
because again we're talking about the magnetic field sort of
doing these twisty turney things creating these magnetic bubbles. Are
they actually taking the cosmic rays and deflecting them from
(15:24):
the Earth essentially from the Sun, or are those bubbles
helping those cosmic rays to reach the Sun and the Earth.
How are they actually helping in terms of defense or aggression?
I guess you can say to our solar system. Yeah,
I mean that is froth, the magnetic bubbles. It doesn't
get any better than that. So I can't wait. You know,
(15:45):
maybe it'll be a couple of years before it actually
goes into interstellar space. But one can only imagine what
sort of information we will get from that. Would your one?
And Voyger too are just fascinating and beautiful, And we
have an article on how stuff works dot com about
the Voyager program you should check out. So go to
house stuff Works, put Voyager into the search bar and
you'll find that. Because they're not only probes of exploration,
(16:08):
their time capsule as saract or or if you will,
tombstones for the human race that have been jettisoned out
there into the void to let everyone know who we
once were and how great we were and what we
look like naked. You're referring to the Golden Album, right,
and the plates. Yeah, and these contain all sorts of
samples I guess you could say from Earth babies cry
(16:28):
trying to think of you know, Dove's Cry that's on there.
That's yeah, yeah, there's some knocking on there, specific pieces
of music that been really important to our culture, and
and then just living sounds. And not only is it
just going, like you say, on sort of a mission
to explore the rest of the Milky Way, but it
does represent a piece of humanity, all right. Well, speaking
(16:50):
of a piece of humanity, let's have that robot bring
us some pieces of humanity in the form of some
listener mail. Here's we see from Rachel in a response
to Toxo plus most of this episode, and it's one
of the more interesting ones. Said that we receive received
a lot of great content that really got people's minds working.
But Rachel retson and says, I really enjoyed your podcast
on toxo. My mom ate Steak Tartar while pregnant with me,
(17:13):
and I was infected with toxo in utero. I was
lucky as this happened during the third trimester. The only
part of me affected with my vision. The toxo parasites
assumed all of the central retina in one eye and
left lesions in both eyes. I had excellent eye care
and where glasses, both for your near sightedness as well
as to protect my good left eye from objects, as
(17:34):
my right eye has only peripheral vision. I also have
a nice stagnus eye wiggling, but that has had minimal
effect on me other than kids teasing me when I
was growing up. I find the information about parasites and
mental health fascinating as well. Thank you for this podcast,
as well as your earlier podcast in a similar topic.
In addition to parasites, I know that there are many
factors in the gut affecting mental health. My daughters and
(17:55):
I have Celiac disease, and I saw a huge change
in my daughter's behavior when we eliminated gluten, and my
moods became much more stable as well. I'd love to
hear a podcast and how different foods can affect us
beyond needing a sandwich when feeling bloody or wrathfle Thanks
again for a great podcast, Rachel, Well, that's a great email.
That's a lot to think about, and it probably does
bear a little bit more exploration into where we've talked
(18:17):
about the gut in the brain, but certainly what we
put in our gut how it affects us. Yeah, and
we will certainly be conducting more research and doing more
episodes regarding our diets and our digestion, as those are
such a fascinating area and there's always new research rolling
out on the subject. So yeah, we definitely live in
an era where we've got a ton of great information
to draw from. All right, here's another one. This is
(18:38):
from Dan dan Wrightson and says Robert and Julie. Last night,
I experienced sleep paralysis for the first time and only
times for my life. I woke up rather suddenly because
I was over keying under my very warm comforter. I
desperately wanted to take the blanket off and cool down,
but I couldn't move at all. I could only open
my eyes. It was a rather scary experience, but I
must say it was reassuring to understand what was happening
(19:00):
from a scientific perspective. After maybe thirty seconds, which felt
much longer given the circumstances, I was finally able to
move and escape from my bed. I can certainly see
why some cultures have explained sleep paralysis as ghostly apparitions
pinning down their victims, but it was very comforting to
know what was exactly happening anyway, keep up the great podcast. Yeah, yeah,
and it is terrifying. I don't know if I've ever
(19:22):
shared it here on the podcast, but I know I've
shared with you that I had a repetitive dream up
until my twenties in which I had a I was
pinned down in my dream and the dog was mulling
my face, and so I would try to wake up
and I'd be like, oh, like just trying to scream
but couldn't move, and it really it's the worst thing
in the world. But understanding why that's happening is it
(19:43):
is incredibly comforting to think, how much, isn't it? Um, Yeah,
this is a dream. This was This was this weird
thing that just happened between disconnect to my muscles and
my brain and I'm not being lifted off to a saucer.
Well there you go. Well I can do the dog. Yeah, well,
well there you go. I tend to think our listeners
tend to already understand how reality and unreality work, and
(20:06):
the difference between a dream and an actual dog modelling.
But to whatever extent we can provide a little more
AMMO to help people when you're having a nightmare or
about a sleep paralysis, then hey, that's just I think
it's just fascinating to know that those are the inner
machinations going on in our brain and our body and
how all of it is connected. Yeah, so Dan, thanks
(20:26):
for sending that in. I'm always delighted to hear about
people's dreams and the various strange things that can go
on during sleep or just in our minds in general
that can sometimes become interpreted as a paranormal encounter. So
if you would like to reach out to us, if
you would like to share something with us and see
what we're up to, and check out some links to
these stuff to Blow your kid's Mind videos that we're
talking about, hit us up on Facebook where we are
(20:46):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and then you can also
find us on Twitter where we are Blow the Mind,
and you can always drop us a line at Blow
the Mind at Discovery dot com. Be sure to check
out our new video podcasts, Stuff from the Future. Join
Howsta Work staff as we explore the most promising and
(21:07):
perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and my name is Julie Douglas,
and we just came off of a week of grueling
video work in which we've created a really exciting product
called Stuff to Blow Your Kid's Mind. It wasn't that
(00:26):
grueling though, well I haven't me. I mean, it wasn't
like we were being forced whipped or anything. It was
a great experience. It was just we had to do
a lot of it in a very short time, and
we had to muddle through some concepts. They're a little
bit heavy, yeah, and my my brain only works well
with conversation and for a very short period of time
every day, so I had to really try and stretch
that time out to cover an entire eight hour periods. Well,
(00:47):
only that we had to become acts. Yes, a little
a little other thing, but anyway. We we have the
chance to talk about the skill of the universe in
one of our episodes for the a s F sponsor
or Stuff to Blow your Kids Mind, and we thought
that this would be an interesting fodder for you guys
that we could expand on a little bit. Yeah, the
video version is going to start off with a cool
(01:08):
little experiment that you can do at home to show
kids or even yourself. I mean, I really had a
ball doing the experiment because it helps me understand all
this stuff that's really so much larger than ourselves. It's
gonna start off with this experiment, and then we're gonna
go in and you're gonna see us float around in
space as we talk about all this stuff. But we
can only go into so much detail there, so this
is considered this a companion piece this episode in which
(01:29):
we discuss the subject of planetary scale and the scale
of our Solar system and a little more detail. Well,
we wanted to try to let kids know just how tiny, tiny,
tiny our Earth is, even though it seems immense, and
so we did sort of this, Uh, I guess you
could say like pantry experiment with a bunch of different
objects that you could find in your home to illustrate this. Right,
(01:52):
So the basic experiment boils down to you're gonna just
grab a few household items to illustrate exactly what the
sizes are. So, for instance, you would start off with Earth,
which is the size of a black peppercorn. Pretty small, right, Jupiter,
the largest planet in our Solar system, would be about
the size of like a gumball or a foosball. So
if you grab one of those and put it next
to a black peppercorn, that would be about the size.
(02:14):
Saturn would be as big as a hazel nut. You're
in this, A Neptune would be coffee veins, Venus would
be a green peppercorn, Mars and Mercury would be just
little pinheads. And then the Sun itself, how big would
that be? Oh? Well, how about a ten pound bowling ball? Yeah, boom.
We are hoping that that gives kids a really good
perspective of, like, again, how tiny the Earth is relative
(02:35):
to the other planets and to the Sun. And when
we talk about that green peppercorn Venus, that's just slightly
larger than the Earth. Just wanted to point that a
since you're like, well, peppercorns, what's up with that? And
what we talked about, which I think it's really interesting,
is okay? Like if that doesn't kind of root you
in an idea of these relative distances, let's talk about
what would happen if we were to take a walk
(02:57):
across the Earth, and then we are about to take
a walk across us for some what might we expect
in those journeys. Well, let's see, the average human being
walks roughly three miles per hour. The circumference of the
Earth is about twenty four thousand, so it would take
you about three days to walk all that that that
that's doable, right, Well, I mean you know, well, and
(03:20):
you also have to have a continuous strip of land
or bridge and which to walk. So it's a thought experiment.
Say like cyborg col Julie could probably do this, right, Like,
I guess, but where cybar Julie. Now, She's never here,
she's being built. Rather, my parts are being built, the
parts that don't need to digest anything and just can
keep walking on and on. But okay, so if you're
(03:42):
going to try to make the same journey around the sun,
what would be facing you is two point seven million miles,
which would take you more than a century to walk. Yeah,
basically about a hundred and two years and some change.
So that definitely that's even something that Cyborg Julie would
have a problem with, I think unless you really pimped
out or metal skin. Yeah, yeah, that's just a couple
of years away. That's like a total nano. This was
(04:05):
interesting to us because we started to say we we
really take all of these distances for granted, the fact
that we even have this knowledge, and you know, we
can look back up the giants of science who began
to get an inkling of just how big our universe is. Yeah,
because the like the bowling ball and the peppercorn and
all that, you can build a thousand yard model with
that where you space them out. And I'll throw some
(04:26):
links to this experiment up on the blog posted accompanies
this episode if you want to try it for real
at home. But if you have a thousand yards, you
can put that bowling ball at one end, and you
can string the planets out at appropriate distances, and you
have a scale model of the Solar system which would
spread out to what about half a mile. Let's imagine
that you are Johannes Kepler, right, your sixteenth century German
(04:48):
mathematician and astronomer. We have discussed him a couple of
times here in the podcast. Yeah, because because the thing is,
we talk about these distances and then you ask, well,
how do we know that, and how is it possible
that we've we've more or less known it for centuries.
Kepler looked at the solar system in the same way
we might look at a race track. All Right, If
you've been to a race track, you know that you
have these inner lanes and then you have progressively outer lanes.
(05:10):
So the distance around that inner lane is less than
the distance around that outer lane. Right, That's why you
always staggered runners, right, But if you weren't to stagger him,
if everybody started at the same time, you'd have less
distance to cover if you're on the inner ring, right,
And if everyone was traveling at the same speed, and
the closer you were to the middle of that race track,
the shorter your trip would be. So Kepler looked out
(05:31):
at the planets and he clocked the time it took
for them to rotate around the Sun and use that
termine exactly how far from the Sun they were. And
that's the breakthrough he had after he went to a
dog race. Right, Yeah, he's able to figure out stuff
that like Mars is one point five times farther from
the Sun than Earth. Right, So he couldn't exactly give
exact measurements in kilometers, but he could figure out the
(05:52):
order of the planets. And for example, we just said
about Mars being farther from the Sun than the Earth.
Then there comes along this guy by the name of
Giovanni Cassini century whereas Johanna s Kepler was that a
century earlier. Yeah, and he is also an astronomer, and
he takes this idea of parallax and he applies it
(06:13):
to the universe. But before we talk about how he
did that, we'll just explain this parallax method, which is
super easy. You just put a finger up and close
one eye and then open the other eye closed and
shift between them. And it appears that your fingers just
has a slight shift to it. When you do that, right,
it appears to jump from the side of the other
(06:34):
back and forth. That you staggered the blinking. Yeah, and
this is because your eyes are separated from each other
by distance of a few inches, so each eye sees
the finger in front of you from a slightly different angle. Now,
you can't really do that with a star or a
planet in the sky. So what good old Giovanni Gazzini
does here is that he says, well, all right, what
have I had one eye here in Paris and I
(06:55):
had another eye in South America, and then I looked
to the heavens right right, So I mean this is
what gave him a baseline, the same parallax right that
your eyes have about those interests between of several thousand kilometers,
and then using geometry, he was able to calculate a
distance from Mars that is only seven percent off today's
more precise measurements, which is pretty incredible because it's kind
(07:16):
of I think about it, it's like, well, what would
you do today? Oh, I had this whole right through
about you know, this parallax method. What if you applied
it to two different geographic points here on Earth to
try to figure out the immensity of the universe. If
today you have a satellite or space probe named after you,
you were pretty dope. I mean you you had it
going on in the brains department and the cosmic mechanics.
(07:38):
You did the leg work for what we have today,
right in terms of our understanding of the universe and
even our more precise measurements like radar, which is what
we used to actually figure out a lot of the distances. Yeah,
radar is pretty simple. You send these waves out, they
bounce off of another planet. They come back, we know
how fast the waves travel, so we time that journey
and then we're able to see exactly how far those
(08:00):
waves travel. Right, And when you're thinking about radio signals,
beaming those back to Earth and that that can be time.
And if that seems weird, just remember that radar is
essentially microwave electromagnetic radiation, and microwaves fall under the radio spectrum.
And so since electromagnetic creation in all of its forms
is light, we know that radar travels at the speed
(08:22):
of light and can measure it. All right, Well, let's
take a quick break and when we come back, we're
gonna start talking about Voyager a little bit. Yeah, and
we're going to talk about breaking through to the other
side into interstellar space. All right, we're back. So Voyager,
just to rehash back in, we launched a Voyager of
(08:44):
one and Voyager two out into space to explore other
planets and to beam information about these planets in our
Solar System back to Earth. And they continue to travel
and we continue to keep in touch with them, and
we're not as close as we used to be. Uh,
you know, they don't they don't come over for dinner
as often and billions. It's going on there and they're
up to interesting things. Well, you know, they again they
(09:05):
gathered all that wonderful data for us and boomed it
back to us, and they are on a new tour
of sorts into interstellar space. At least that's what we
think any day now up until about two years from now,
that this is going to happen. And the reason we
know this is because they are again collecting data, particularly
about the solar winds that we know are present in
(09:27):
our Solar system. And what they found, researchers found this
actually last spring, is that the solar winds completely died down.
And at first they thought this was anomally because these
are the sort of particles that were coming at the
probe right, But then they realized that no, that they
are actually entering the helio pause. And you think helio pause,
do you think you know? A son and then a
(09:48):
quick stop before you start again. This is the outermost
bubble the surrounding the Solar system. They're at the cusp
of it. I like to think of it in terms
of imagine the Sun is a camp fire and the
planets are more or less huddled around this camp fire
for warmth and energy and light, and the farther you
walk away from that camp fire, the darker it gets,
(10:09):
the colder it gets. Until you actually walk into the darkness,
you've passed that point where the light from the fire
and the heat from the fire ceases to be a
commanding factor the right. So voyagers essentially passing out through
this darkness. And again to talk about the speeds, they
had been going something like a hundred and fifty thousand
miles per hour, that's what the solar winds were blowing on.
(10:32):
They just stopped, period. I mean, that's really traumatic. Voyager
one is both the fastest moving and the most distant
man made object. Yeah, which is incredible that again it's beaming,
even the fact that the solar winds completely died down.
So researchers found that the speed of the charge particles
hitting Voyagers outward face matched the spacecraft's own speed. And
that's what you're talking about, We're talking about that camp
(10:52):
fire kind of dying out, because that suggests that the
probe has bumped up against pressure from the interstellar magnetic field,
the region between the stars right right outside of our
solar system. So again that's an indication that less and
less of the Sun's influence is apparent, and that the
spacecraft is actually entering new territory. So what do we
have going on in the outer limits of our solar system?
(11:16):
This is an interesting thing to mention too. We talked
about the magnetic field. In June of last year. It
was discovered that the time the spacecraft was moving through
what pop Side described in its article Voyager one might
leave the Solar System any day now, a foamy froth
of magnetic bubbles, which is a bizarre phenomenon that results
from the criss crossing and rejoining of magnetic field lines
(11:38):
at the edge of the Solar system. So what is
beyond that? Well, there are two things that interest us here,
and one is the Kuiper Belt, and this is a
disc shaped region of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune,
billions of kilometers from our son. Yeah, it's thought to
be sort of like leftover material from the formation of
our solar system. It's still within our solar system. In fact,
(12:01):
it contains Pluto, which is the largest object in the
Kuiper Belt, and the Copper Belt is also leaved to
be the source for short period commets. Those are comments
that take about less than two hundred years to orbit. Now,
if you go out even farther, you encounter something called
the Orc Cloud, which is also thought to be home
to a number of commets as well. And this is
an immense spherical cloud surrounding the planetary system, thought to
(12:24):
extend approximately three light years and is about thirty trillion
kilometers from the Sun. This is speculative, but it's also
thought that the Orc Cloud may account for a significant
fraction of the mass in the Solar System, perhaps as
much or even more than the planet Jupiter. So that
much mass just spread out. Yeah, again, this is a theory.
This idea that the Orc Cloud is sort of like
(12:45):
a thick bubble that surrounds the entire Solar System, reaching
about halfway from the Sun to the next nearest star.
And there's also this idea that it intersects with the
Kuiper Belt. This is the cosmic riff raff that lives
on the margins of planetary society. Yeah, including a long
period comments. Again, this is the theory of the source
of those Yeah, yeah, big time drifters. But I think
(13:08):
what's so tantalizing about this idea of voyager leaving our
solar system and going into into stellar space. Is that
it is collecting all of this data and changing the
way that we are viewing how the universe works and
challenging some of our theories. So will we gather more
data about the Orc cloud, will we say, yes, this
this thing actually exists, and once it does go into
(13:30):
interstellar space and is under the influence of other sons again,
who knows, you know, sort of time period we're looking
at In terms of that, of course, how is that
going to again change our understanding of our relative place
here on Earth and the universe around us. Well, for starters,
if we were to aim Voyager one at Alpha Centauri,
(13:53):
he could make it there in about seventy tho years
and yeah, so probably not in our time in terms
of another sun like major influence. But what about the
space in between? Right? Yeah, but I've also read that
Voyager one is more like it's not these are Voyger
one and Voyger two are not really aimed at any
interstellar destinations. But Voyager one is roughly headed towards the
(14:17):
constellation off a Ucas. So in the year forty thousand,
two hundred and seventy two, a D Voyager one will
come within one point seven light years of an obscure
star in the constellation or some a minor the Little
Bear or the Little Dipper called a C plus seventy
nine three eighty eight. And then voyager To it's estimated
(14:39):
that in about forty thousand years it will come within
about one point seven light years of a star called
ross to forty eight, a small star in the constellation
of Andromeda. So these are colossal numbers, and they give
you just a little more insight into this the colossal
scale of the universe beyond our Solar system, which is
ultimately just as puny punior in the grand scheme of things,
(15:01):
and our Earth is within our own solar system. Well,
and I think just even even the bits of information
that have come back, like what's happening at the edge
of the Solar system, these magnetic bubbles, this now brings
into question, well, what are these magnetic bubbles doing anyway,
because again we're talking about the magnetic field sort of
doing these twisty turney things creating these magnetic bubbles. Are
they actually taking the cosmic rays and deflecting them from
(15:24):
the Earth essentially from the Sun, or are those bubbles
helping those cosmic rays to reach the Sun and the Earth.
How are they actually helping in terms of defense or aggression?
I guess you can say to our solar system. Yeah,
I mean that is froth, the magnetic bubbles. It doesn't
get any better than that. So I can't wait. You know,
(15:45):
maybe it'll be a couple of years before it actually
goes into interstellar space. But one can only imagine what
sort of information we will get from that. Would your one?
And Voyger too are just fascinating and beautiful, And we
have an article on how stuff works dot com about
the Voyager program you should check out. So go to
house stuff Works, put Voyager into the search bar and
you'll find that. Because they're not only probes of exploration,
(16:08):
their time capsule as saract or or if you will,
tombstones for the human race that have been jettisoned out
there into the void to let everyone know who we
once were and how great we were and what we
look like naked. You're referring to the Golden Album, right,
and the plates. Yeah, and these contain all sorts of
samples I guess you could say from Earth babies cry
(16:28):
trying to think of you know, Dove's Cry that's on there.
That's yeah, yeah, there's some knocking on there, specific pieces
of music that been really important to our culture, and
and then just living sounds. And not only is it
just going, like you say, on sort of a mission
to explore the rest of the Milky Way, but it
does represent a piece of humanity, all right. Well, speaking
(16:50):
of a piece of humanity, let's have that robot bring
us some pieces of humanity in the form of some
listener mail. Here's we see from Rachel in a response
to Toxo plus most of this episode, and it's one
of the more interesting ones. Said that we receive received
a lot of great content that really got people's minds working.
But Rachel retson and says, I really enjoyed your podcast
on toxo. My mom ate Steak Tartar while pregnant with me,
(17:13):
and I was infected with toxo in utero. I was
lucky as this happened during the third trimester. The only
part of me affected with my vision. The toxo parasites
assumed all of the central retina in one eye and
left lesions in both eyes. I had excellent eye care
and where glasses, both for your near sightedness as well
as to protect my good left eye from objects, as
(17:34):
my right eye has only peripheral vision. I also have
a nice stagnus eye wiggling, but that has had minimal
effect on me other than kids teasing me when I
was growing up. I find the information about parasites and
mental health fascinating as well. Thank you for this podcast,
as well as your earlier podcast in a similar topic.
In addition to parasites, I know that there are many
factors in the gut affecting mental health. My daughters and
(17:55):
I have Celiac disease, and I saw a huge change
in my daughter's behavior when we eliminated gluten, and my
moods became much more stable as well. I'd love to
hear a podcast and how different foods can affect us
beyond needing a sandwich when feeling bloody or wrathfle Thanks
again for a great podcast, Rachel, Well, that's a great email.
That's a lot to think about, and it probably does
bear a little bit more exploration into where we've talked
(18:17):
about the gut in the brain, but certainly what we
put in our gut how it affects us. Yeah, and
we will certainly be conducting more research and doing more
episodes regarding our diets and our digestion, as those are
such a fascinating area and there's always new research rolling
out on the subject. So yeah, we definitely live in
an era where we've got a ton of great information
to draw from. All right, here's another one. This is
(18:38):
from Dan dan Wrightson and says Robert and Julie. Last night,
I experienced sleep paralysis for the first time and only
times for my life. I woke up rather suddenly because
I was over keying under my very warm comforter. I
desperately wanted to take the blanket off and cool down,
but I couldn't move at all. I could only open
my eyes. It was a rather scary experience, but I
must say it was reassuring to understand what was happening
(19:00):
from a scientific perspective. After maybe thirty seconds, which felt
much longer given the circumstances, I was finally able to
move and escape from my bed. I can certainly see
why some cultures have explained sleep paralysis as ghostly apparitions
pinning down their victims, but it was very comforting to
know what was exactly happening anyway, keep up the great podcast. Yeah, yeah,
and it is terrifying. I don't know if I've ever
(19:22):
shared it here on the podcast, but I know I've
shared with you that I had a repetitive dream up
until my twenties in which I had a I was
pinned down in my dream and the dog was mulling
my face, and so I would try to wake up
and I'd be like, oh, like just trying to scream
but couldn't move, and it really it's the worst thing
in the world. But understanding why that's happening is it
(19:43):
is incredibly comforting to think, how much, isn't it? Um, Yeah,
this is a dream. This was This was this weird
thing that just happened between disconnect to my muscles and
my brain and I'm not being lifted off to a saucer.
Well there you go. Well I can do the dog. Yeah, well,
well there you go. I tend to think our listeners
tend to already understand how reality and unreality work, and
(20:06):
the difference between a dream and an actual dog modelling.
But to whatever extent we can provide a little more
AMMO to help people when you're having a nightmare or
about a sleep paralysis, then hey, that's just I think
it's just fascinating to know that those are the inner
machinations going on in our brain and our body and
how all of it is connected. Yeah, so Dan, thanks
(20:26):
for sending that in. I'm always delighted to hear about
people's dreams and the various strange things that can go
on during sleep or just in our minds in general
that can sometimes become interpreted as a paranormal encounter. So
if you would like to reach out to us, if
you would like to share something with us and see
what we're up to, and check out some links to
these stuff to Blow your kid's Mind videos that we're
talking about, hit us up on Facebook where we are
(20:46):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and then you can also
find us on Twitter where we are Blow the Mind,
and you can always drop us a line at Blow
the Mind at Discovery dot com. Be sure to check
out our new video podcasts, Stuff from the Future. Join
Howsta Work staff as we explore the most promising and
(21:07):
perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com