November 6, 2025 • 53 mins
Recorded November 1, 2025: It's Made of Stars... LIVE! How do you move a space shuttle without a shuttle mover and while preserving it? We're learning more about Jupiter's role in our solar system. Plus 3I/ATLAS and its strange behavior has scientists scratching their heads. Plus photos from the 50's have light flashes that could be UFOs.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Warning. The following podcast contains an entertaining look at astronomy, physics,
and space news throughout the known universe. Listeners have been
known to learn about astronomical phenomenon, the scientific method, and
expanded vocabulary to include terms like quasar asterism and uranus. Listen,
that's your own risk.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Go ahead. When Made of Stars, made them Stars.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Made When Maida Stars Media, you could be from high
they would New Mexico, Mars.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
We're on.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Stars, Whens, Welcome to Made of Stars Live.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
There we go.
Speaker 5 (01:04):
This is our first run at doing a show live
in front of an audience. I am seated here next
to my good friend, doctor Sean Cruise, an executive director
of Columbus State University's Coca Cola Space Science Center, where
we are set up doing the show live on a
Saturday night during a college football game of some import
to at least some people in town.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
No one in this room. And I am Wes Carrol.
Speaker 5 (01:27):
I'm just he's the executive director and an astrophysicist and
all that fun stuff. And I'm Wes Carol, just a
nerdy guy who got into broadcasting and likes all of
this space stuff. So here we are ready to do
a show for you guys. Thank you guys for being
here tonight. We thought, with the invitation of doctor Troy
(01:47):
Keller and the Department of Earth and Space Science has
invited us to do this show in a different format,
and we thought, well, why not do it here in
this particular venue, in this particular room here at the
cocolasp A Science Center.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
So with that, I welcome in Sean and Sean. Here
we are.
Speaker 5 (02:04):
It's finally here. Made of Stars, Live Wells. We've been
talking about this for quite some time.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
We didn't know exactly how this was gonna go, but
right now I think it's going swimmingly. So far, so good,
Absolutely swimmingly and waiting to use that word all week swimmingly. Well,
I've got a.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
Word we're gonna use in a few minutes quite a bit,
and it's not a word we say a lot on
this show. Aliens. We're gonna get to aliens in this show.
So we have two alien stories somehow, and it's not
the movies. We've talked more about the alien movies, I think,
than actual aliens on the show over the years. But
(02:43):
we have two like legit alien stories.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
I mean they are legit that's the thing. We try
to keep a high level on this particular podcast for fact, right,
and we try to say we try to in fact,
one of the things we like to tell our audiences is, hey,
that's clickbait. Don't pay any attention to that, right. But
yet I find ourselves in this position west where we
have two alien stories on the same podcast.
Speaker 5 (03:07):
We also don't typically talk about politics, and we're going
to start with a story that involves politics.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
We are allergic to politics this on this podcast.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
I mean, we avoid it as much as we can,
but it does sometimes roll into this, just like aliens
sometimes roll into what we do, and they're really like
they may even be just zooming right into it apparently.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
But we'll get to that coming up.
Speaker 5 (03:31):
Let's start with this, this story, this one that touches
on politics, because it's about a very special artifact that
is supposed to be preserved forever as is, and we
have people that want to chop it up and move
it around.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
What we want to do in the museum industry is
we want to take artifacts that were essential parts of
the American space program here at Space Science Center and
preserve them literally for all time if possible, Right, at
least as long as they're in our care. We want
to take care of the pieces that you see out
in the gallery of this very facility so that the
next generation can know and understand and see and have
(04:11):
a tactle experience with actual artifacts. Well, when the American
Space Program decided to shut down the shuttle program, the
Space Shuttle program, they did this, they said, look, we're
going to give the four existing space shuttles away, and
the Space Shuttle Endeavor was given away to the California
Science Center. California Science Center is going to be a
(04:31):
fantastic vertical display of that particular shuttle. They're working on
that right now. Then the Space Shuttle of Atlantis was
given away to the Kennedy Space Center's Visitor Center. I
don't know if you've been down and seeing that. That's
one of the greatest museums in America. Quite frankly, friends,
and Space Shuttle Atlantis is tilted. It's on kind of
an interesting pitch the way they tilted it to display it.
(04:53):
And then of course there's the Space Shuttle Endeavor. I'm sorry,
that's in California Space Shttle Enterprise, which never went to space,
but it was doing drop Tests that sits on the
Intrepid Air and Space Museum. That's an aircraft carrier in
the Harbor in New York City. Okay, So all of
those were put in displays where there were some liberties
that could be taken into to make them attractive, to
(05:14):
make them exciting. But the one that they wanted to
actually preserve like a time capsule was Space Shuttle Discovery.
That's the one that they wanted to keep intact as
original as they possibly could. They gave it to whom
the Smithsonian. Right, so it is in the Udvar Hazy
Center in Washington, d C. That's near Dulles Airport. It
(05:35):
is being preserved for all time, making sure it stays
as original as it possibly can for all time. Break
out the chainsaws. Until recently, you see, there was a
certain piece of legislation that was passed had the initials
OBBA of three b's OBBBA. That's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, friends.
(06:00):
And in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, there is
finances to take the Space Shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian
to the Johnson Space Space Center Houston to put on
display in Houston, Texas. Now, look, Johnson Space Center is
headquarters of the astronaut program. I think they probably should
(06:23):
have had a shuttle when we were dealing out shuttles, right,
they probably should have gotten one. It was probably a
political baseball at that time that they didn't get a
shuttle to put on display.
Speaker 5 (06:35):
I mean, if you're handing out shuttles and they were,
you know, you would think Johnson would at least be
able to.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Get a space shuttle, and you get a space shuttle,
not you, Johnson Space Center.
Speaker 5 (06:47):
So part of the complication with this is that they
used to have this method of transporting the shuttles. It
would piggyback it on top of a shuttle transporter.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
It was that aircraft. If you want to see a
model of this right out in front of the the
nose of our Space Shuttle Odyssey out in the exhibit
gallery looking at a case, there's a model of space shuttle
sitting on the back of a Boeing seven forty seven,
which is the transport plane. They could fly these shuttles
around back then. But see the problem is they have
now mothballed all of the seven forty sevens capable of
(07:17):
carrying a space shuttle anywhere. So how do you get
a shuttle from Washington, DC to Houston, Texas. It requires
a chainsaw. Friends. Yeah, so that's the plan. The plan
is to cut up Space Shuttle Discovery, the one pristine,
keep it the way it was for all future generations.
(07:38):
They're going to chop it into pieces and mail it FedEx.
Speaker 5 (07:42):
I don't know, so, I mean, I'm just sitting here
trying to understand, Like, did they miss the memo.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
About preserving it? Yes, Okay, I'm gonna go at that.
Answers that. So, so, okay, what did the Smithsonian do? Well?
They started an effort to try to stop this happen. No, no, please,
don't do this. There's a reason it's here. We want
to preserve it. Okay. So, the latest Space story this
week regarding this whole situation is that John Cornyn Ted Cruz,
(08:13):
both Senators, and Representative Randy Weeber from Texas have actually
they've actually reached out to the Department of Justice to
investigate the Smithsonian for violations of the Anti Lobbying Act
using federal dollars to lobby for their cause. And see,
here's the problem. The problem is now we have US
(08:36):
senators basically taking legal action against the Smithsonian so that
the Space Shuttle Discovery can be chopped up and sent
in pieces to the Johnson Space Center.
Speaker 5 (08:46):
So there's no way to put this on Like, it's
too big to put on a truck, it's too big
to transport on a train, it's too big to transport
on anything else. It has to be disassembled.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Yeah, yes, and then that would leave no pristine models
left because we've allowed these museums to do all these
kind of creative things with it. See the problem. And again,
I'm not up here saying, oh, this party's bad or
that party's bad. Johnson Space that probably should have gotten
a Space shuttle, right. All I'm saying is, are we
really gonna cut up Space Shuttle Discovery with a chainsaw?
(09:21):
Are we really gonna do that? America? Apparently apparently we're
moving toward.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
Yes.
Speaker 5 (09:28):
I mean, it was just Halloween yesterday as we're recording this,
So if you're gonna start hacking up stuff with chainsaws,
it seems like it tis the season, just not that.
So is what is ultimately where this is gonna head?
Do we think it's gonna actually make it to Johnson
or do we I mean, is this well.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Political tides right now would say yes, right, And so
we don't really know. Because it's twenty twenty five America.
Things are a little strange, right, But it's leaning toward
the momentum is that it looks like it's problem going
to get moved, and the only one way to move
it is to cut it up. When you think.
Speaker 5 (10:03):
About emergency preparation, what comes to mind. Maybe some flashlights
and some extra batteries, maybe a first aid kid. Maybe
you've even thought as far as some freeze dried food.
I don't know how far you've thought. I know the
things that I think about when I think about emergency preparation,
(10:24):
and I can tell you this, the folks at prep
starts now dot com have thought of all of it.
Not only when you go to their website can you
join their mailing list and get a prep Starts Now
emergency planning guide. They also have a prep blog full
of ideas and things that probably never cross your mind.
(10:45):
And as you look through the site, you also notice
there's a lot of other things that never would have
crossed my mind, whether it's vitamins and supplements, whether it
is ways to filter your own water, plenty of first
aid essentials that you're gonna need. Of course, that freeze
dried food is there for you as well, but how
about things like camping gear, tactical gear, emergency essentials that
(11:07):
you need for your car to keep it running, the
things that'll keep you alive for seventy two hours in
a crisis, and not just you, but also your family.
You don't want to be scrambling to try to figure out, well,
what do I do? You want to know that you
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(11:28):
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(11:53):
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Speaker 2 (12:05):
Made of stars.
Speaker 5 (12:06):
Right after this, let's talk about Jupiter. I always like
(12:32):
when we get one of these stories that really connects
to the marvel of our Solar system, why it's unique,
why it's special. And I know we got alien stories
coming up, and we're going to talk about the possibility
of things, you know, outside of our Solar System and that.
But we always regularly on this show, and there's a
(12:53):
lot of discussion about the fact that, you know, we
have these exoplanets in places that sometimes are in that
log zone, that area where you say, you know, it's
the right temperature, it's the right circumstance, right distance from
its star, that it could host life. But there are
so many different factors in our Solar System that allow
(13:14):
us to be here and to function. The Moon plays
a role, and we're learning a little bit more about
Jupiter's role.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
So Jupiter is a very important planet for life on Earth.
We knew that to some degree already. One of the
things it does is it sweeps up a lot of
debris coming in from the outer Solar System, particularly in
the early history of the Solar System, and keeps those
pieces from bombarding the surface of our planet in the
inner part of the Solar System so that we can
(13:41):
have a long, long enough span of time to have
life on the surface of the Earth. But a new study,
and by the way, this is from a story on
space dot com if you want to check it out.
A new study out of Rice University in Houston says
this that Jupiter's role was even more important than we
previously thought because Jupiter's big I don't know how many
(14:03):
people here had a big brother in school that kind
of looked out for you at school, I did, you're
raising your hand? Remember this, The radio show makes the noise.
If you had a big brother, it makes the noise. Yeah, okay,
a few of us, all right, So that's good. So
Jupiter was kind of like our big brother. And when
we got in trouble at school, Jupiter would pop up
and he would say, I'm gonna take care of you.
(14:23):
So what Jupiter did was the gravitational mass of Jupiter,
which formed relatively quickly in the early part of the
Solar System, was so extensive and so strong that Jupiter's
gravity managed to carve gaps into the giant disc of
material swirling around the proto Sun in the very early
part of the universe. And it turns out that these
gaps were absolutely necessary to prevent the building blocks that
(14:48):
formed our planet, also the planet's Mars, Venus, and Mercury,
from simply just plummeting into the Sun. In the early
part of the Solar System, that gravitational carving up of
the disc of material around the protosun. In a new study,
it's been shown that it was absolutely essential to provide
a cutoff of flow of gas and dust that would
(15:09):
just simply fall in through the inner part of the
Solar System and right into the Sun. Instead, what happened
is that Jupiter caused basically a resonance pattern throughout the disk.
So you have these lumps of rings of material that
acted as kind of like a traffic barrier, a slow
down in traffic that held up that material from fast
falling into the Sun that allowed it to hang around
(15:31):
in a more stable orbit long enough to form those
planets on the inside. Now, the team out of Rice University,
they were verifying this using computer simulations, and so they said, well,
we're going to run simulations and see what happens. And
so their computer simulations showed these shapes and structures in
the Solar System forming specifically because of the gravitational influence
(15:55):
of those gas giant planets. So see, if you want
a rocky world like Earth in that special part of
the Solar System that we call the Goldilock zone, it's
just right, not too hot, not too cold, it can
have life on it because it's just right all those conditions.
Then you're probably going to need a giant gas giant
planet like Jupiter out there to cause these resonances and
(16:17):
ripples within that proto planetary disc to allow those small
planets to form in that Goldilock zone. So a quote
from Andrea Isidoro, who is one of the co authors
co leads on the study, said, this Jupiter didn't just
become the biggest planet. It set the architecture for the
whole inner Solar System, and without it, we might not
(16:37):
have had Earth as we know it. So see, when
we talk about the fact that we're made of stars,
you're born of star stuff, right, It's more than just that.
It's more than just those elements that were composed of
being formed in some distant supernova and then gathering in
a cloud. There had to be so many different conditions
(17:00):
that happened in a just right sort of way to
even allow the planet that we have to be in
that habitable zone and then to be just right for
the conditions for life to be on the surface. It's
actually kind of incredible. And now that we know that
the traffic jams caused by Jupiter in the inner early
Solar System was just one more piece of this intricate
(17:22):
puzzle of making our part of our Solar system habitable
so that we could be here tonight and hang out
in the planetarium.
Speaker 5 (17:30):
Yeah, I noticed you mentioned Earth, Venus, and Mars. I
think mercury in there as well. How does Uranus fit
into all this?
Speaker 2 (17:40):
It's on the outs, okay, just checking.
Speaker 5 (17:42):
I always have to get in the occasional reference to Uranus.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
One last thing before we go to Uranus. One last
thing that we want to talk about is that we
actually see these ridges and ripples in newly forming star
systems around other stars. So it gets predicted on a
computer simulation at Rice University, and then some person with
a telescope like doctor Williams goes out there and starts
observing the sky and they actually see the same thing
(18:10):
that the computer models predicted for real around some other
distant protostar. Friends that's what I think science is beautiful. Right,
That's when science that is at its most elegant. It's
when we can use our computer simulations and our insights
about the mathematics and about the forces of physics involved
(18:32):
to say, oh, well, look, this condition should exist, and
then we go out and actually see that condition in nature.
That is the miracle of predictive science. And it's a
pretty darn cool thing.
Speaker 5 (18:48):
So you mentioned science and the beauty of it, So
that leads us to aliens.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Now we're gonna talk about aliens. We're gonna talk a
lot about aliens.
Speaker 5 (18:57):
So this is something that has been in it It's
been a clickbait story, but it's also got some teeth
to it. And that's what's so weird about it. We've
been doing this show and I mentioned before we started
the podcast to our our audience here. I didn't say
the show is recorded in front of a live audience
(19:18):
like they used to do on old TV shows. I
should have done that. But the fact that we've been
doing this in some form since two thousand and seven,
and we don't often get opportunities to talk about things
like aliens.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
But it's kind of become like.
Speaker 5 (19:33):
We had these phases where like they were talking about
it in Congress and we're like, wait a minute, this
is a real thing. Now we have to cover it
in some capacity as space media. And now this is
another one of those things where we have this comment.
It's come from outside of our solar system, and it's
(19:54):
acting kind of strangely. It's not acting the way other
comments have acted, or really anything in our solar system
has acted. And we've got some people that have said
hang and smart people that have said.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Hang on, you mean not like us. That's what I'm saying,
hang on.
Speaker 5 (20:11):
Maybe this could be something that is, you know, alien
in nature, and it could be some kind of a probe.
And then suddenly, you know, you see it at first,
and I know that you get the texts from people
that say, wait a minute, what is this? Sometimes those
texts come from me, but usually I kind of know
where to dig and find out any legitimacy to it.
(20:33):
And I remember texting you going.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
This is almost has some truth to it. What's going
on with this? So? Yeah, how soon before we're taking
over and we all die? It's like Tuesday, I think, okay,
so perfect act Accordingly, I'm just going to say.
Speaker 5 (20:48):
Yeah, I mean, maybe they'll let us make it to
the holidays, and then we can get into the new
year and.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
They might want to come to the holidays. They may
they invite an alien to your holiday. I think it's
a good thing to do. It is nice. So let's
talk about three I at lists. All right, So three
I means there was a two I means there was
a one eye. You can go ahead. I'm just gonna
let that hang in the air. What does I stand for?
It stands for Interstellar, great movie, which was it was?
(21:16):
It was okay, I mean it was pretty good. If
you're under selling it, buddy, I mean Kip Thorne wrote it.
It's about quantum mechanics. It's it's pretty cool. Yeah, all right,
but that's a big level of entry for most people. Yeah,
it's just okay, all right. So what was three I? Well,
three I stands for the third interstellar object that we've
ever discovered. That's wait, friends, don't miss this part of
(21:41):
the story. You live in a time where we now
know for certain that objects from outside of our solar
system are passing through our solar system. This is only
the third one ever discovered. What was the second one
two I two I was called two I Borisov, and
(22:02):
that was just a couple of years ago that two
I Borisov was found. And then the first one was
one eye, and one eye was called Omua Moua twenty seventeen.
So the very first object that we ever knew that
was coming from a star somewhere else, not our own son,
a star system outside of our own solar system, was
(22:23):
in twenty seventeen. So you live in a pretty cool time.
Don't miss that part of the story, right, it's pretty neat.
So within that just few years, less than a decade,
we have now discovered three objects that we know for
certain came from beyond the confines of our own solar system,
and they zip through and we got to study them,
(22:44):
and we got to understand that they're a little bit
different than some of the comments in our own solar
system or some of the objects in our own solar system.
All right, So Omuamua was one eye, Borisov was two I.
This is three I three I atlas. Okay. Now, doubtless,
if you're on any of social media or heck media
in general, you have probably seen stories that there's this
(23:05):
physicist from Harvard, who is telling everybody, I think this
is an alien probe. Now listen, the gentleman's name is
Avi Lobe. Avi Lobe is not unintelligent. He's a very
smart man, and he's offering up an alternative viewpoint. And
in science, that's what we do. We say, hey, crazy idea,
(23:28):
here's my crazy idea. And then we say, okay, well,
can we either verify your crazy idea or can we
give you seven reasons why your crazy idea couldn't possibly
be true, or even one reason for that matter. And
so that's what science is all about. Science is about
somebody throwing up an idea and saying, I think this
is true because I've got a couple of maybe incomplete
(23:51):
pieces of evidence, but I think they might lead to
this unusual conclusion. Well, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. So
the rest of the scientific community engages and they say, oh,
that's an interesting idea, but you haven't thought about X,
and you haven't thought about why, and you haven't thought
about Z, and all of those reasons deny this thing
(24:11):
that you're talking about. Okay, So in the last last
couple of weeks a few weeks, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Lobe
has suggested that this mysterious object called three I Atlas
is indeed an interstellar object, maybe even an alien probe.
As Wes said, he's more comfortable with the word probe
than I am.
Speaker 5 (24:31):
Well, I was just going to say probe an alien
doesn't usually bode well. And all of the the stories
and you know, especially like you know, rural Kansas and places,
so whenever they start talking about that, I get really uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
I have family in Kansas. Yeah, so we'll see, you know, Yeah,
I'm aware. So uh.
Speaker 5 (24:53):
I mentioned that it's not behaving the way that a
normal object in our solar system would behave.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
So we go through this process.
Speaker 5 (25:02):
This is where you're talking about sciencing it and going
through this whole process of trying to figure out what's
there what's not. There's been this suggestion about, well, what
if it starts to behave this way or it starts
to do you know, certain things that what might indicate
it's not behaving normally and some of the abnormal things
(25:24):
are happening.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
You've got to understand this about three I Atlas. It
was only discovered in July of this year, right, so
we have only known about it a very short period
of time. The other thing is right now, well maybe
forty eight hours ago, forty eight hours ago. Right now,
it's passing its nearest pass to the Sun, which we
call perihelion. And when a comet, if it is a
(25:47):
it acts a lot like a comet, by the way,
But when a comet passes near the Sun, that's the
most engaging moment for that comet and it's orbit around
the Sun, because in that period of time and it's
nearest to the Sun, it is at its highest temperature,
and it's at its highest velocity, at its highest gravitational
shear from the Sun, and so things begin to happen.
(26:08):
It begins to sublimate or lose material, it begins to
have its structure kind of challenged or rearranged by that
gravitational torque of the Sun itself. And that's when we
can tell, you know, if it acts like a comet,
or if it acts like something else. I will tell
you that. The headline from ScienceDaily dot com, where I
got the story says, this comet visitor is baffling scientists.
(26:29):
I just love these words. Right, It's just like anytime
I see the headline scientists are baffled, Troy, how many
times you've been just baffled? That? Never ever, Troy never
gets baffled. So but listen, there are some things that
you should know about this that are in fact baffling.
This comet is weird, make no mistake. Three I Atlas
is strange, not because it's a daily in spacecraft, but
(26:51):
because of the things I'm about to tell you. First
of all, it's moving at two hundred and forty five
thousand kilometers per hour, which makes it that's fast. It's
just faster than my Toyota Tacoma. It's the fastest known
object to ever be observed in the Solar System. Ever,
it's on what's called a hyperbolic orbit. That's one of
(27:12):
the ways that we know that it came from outside
of our Solar system. Number Two, it's enormous by comet standards,
or particularly interstellar comet standards. It is twelve point five
miles across. It's the size of the island of Manhattan.
Borisov was only six tenths of a mile across. A
(27:34):
Muahmua was only a quarter of a mile across. This
thing is twelve and a half miles across. It's really
really big, much bigger than those other ones.
Speaker 5 (27:42):
They know the size because the naked cowboy was on it,
just playing his guitar.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Manhattan. You mean yeh, yeah, yeah, I thought you meant
slim pickens from that, but yeah, okay. So it's also
likely an ancient object. We can tell which direction it
came from. We look that direction and say, well, what
star systems are over there, and then we give it
an estimate for how long it would have been traveling
in transit to get to our solar system, and we say, oow,
(28:09):
it's probably twice as old as anything in our solar system,
so it's truly ancient. It had a tail like a
comet outside the orbit of Jupiter, which is five times
more distant from the Sun than we are just safe
to say, if that number doesn't mean anything to you,
that's a long way from the Sun. Comets do not
(28:30):
generally generate a tail material streaming away from them at
a distance of five times the distance from the Earth.
That tells us it has a high content of CO two,
frozen carbon dioxide, dry ice, anything else unusual about the tail.
So there's another weird part of a tail story. That
happened when it got closer to the Sun, which it
(28:51):
began to have what's called an anti tail. It began
to have a horn out the front of it, basically
that pointed at the Sun. You see why comets have
tails stream away from the Sun is because of the
stellar wind blowing that material out away from the nucleus
of that common inner direction radially out from the Sun.
But this comment actually formed a forward facing tail and
anti tail. So that was a little bit of a
(29:13):
strange thing about The tail took of a unicorn factor.
It looks like it was kind of, you know, cord light.
It's not that we've never seen anti tails on commets before,
but they are a rare phenomenon. So that's another weird thing. Now, this, friends,
might be one of the most strange things. There's a
few other things you can get online and read about them,
but this is the really weird one to me personally.
(29:34):
It's coming in directly in what's called the ecliptic plane
the planets or but the Sun in a disc. You
don't have Jupiter going one way and Saturn going out
in a different direction, and Mars in a different plane.
All the planets kind of parade around the Sun within
a disc in the same direction. It's counter clockwise as
(29:54):
viewed from north. And that's because that's the direction of
rotation of the inner part of the Solar System. And
it was information. Okay, so a comment could come in,
particularly from another star system, at any random angle whatsoever.
But this object common Atlas three eye Atlas is coming
in almost exactly in the same plane as our planetary system.
Speaker 5 (30:17):
Alien navigators, which is one of the reasons that people
like Auvi Lobe say, well, now that's just too weird
to explain. I mean, because I want to tell you
the statistics for that are extraordinarily unlikely. How about that for.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
It to come from a different star system outside our
Solar system, but yet be in the orbital plane of
our planets, very very weird. So that's all of those
things together kind of get the attention of the scientific community, go,
this thing is not like anything we've seen before for
all of this myriad of reasons which I saw that
(30:53):
it's glowing blue. Now is that normal? I mean no, right,
so it is it's blue or in most comets. That's
another unusual characteristic. It has low iron nickel ratio it's
got way too much nickel weighed not enough iron, which
is also weird. And it's got a weird extreme negative
polarization of the light reflecting off it. If you want
to know more about that, ask me after the show.
(31:14):
I can tell you more about it. But there are
weird things about it that just don't seem to happen
with other comets, which is why it kind of triggers
the oh, we're not looking at an average comet instinct
within our personalities, and so it builds these speculations that
start to happen.
Speaker 5 (31:30):
Not everybody knows this, but blue is the universal color
for probe coming.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
And to think I almost wore blue tonight, I did.
I don't know what that means. I don't know. We
don't need to talk about that later, Wes. So we
have we've.
Speaker 5 (31:47):
Gotten some looks at it along the way, or we're
going to get some more looks at this thing.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Remember right now, it's close to the sun. That means
the only telescopes that can see it right now are
those telescopes that are pointed at the sun, and believe
or not, some of those sun facingelescopes that are made
to observe the Sun. They're sensitive of enough that they're
actually picking it up. This comet has also brightened at
a ridiculously strong and rapid rate, unlike other comets. Within
(32:12):
the next twenty four hours, it's going to be in
position to be observed by something called the Juice spacecraft.
Juice is a strained acronym by the European Space Agency.
Don't worry about that. It's a spacecraft that's on its
way out to Europa, which is one of the moons
around Jupiter. So the Juice spacecraft, though, is going to
be able to look at this comet tomorrow. So we're
(32:33):
going to get another better look now after it passed
around its closest past to the Sun. I would tell
you this if this story interests you, watch the news
over the next few days, because things are going to
begin to unravel rapidly in terms of data coming in
and us getting new looks at this object. We won't
actually be able to see it with earthbound telescopes until
the latter part of November and into early December. So
(32:56):
listen to the podcast. We will keep you up to
date on the weird three. I at Las comment.
Speaker 5 (33:00):
And I feel it's just only you know the good
that we mentioned this. If you you know your kids
have a home telescope, don't point it at the sun
to try to look at this thing. Never a good
idea or ever. Yeah, ever, but especially not now, because
they would really be concentrating looking for the blue thing flying.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Flying, see blue spots. That's not the comment.
Speaker 5 (33:20):
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Speaker 2 (34:47):
More.
Speaker 5 (34:48):
We're Made of Stars right after this, Hey, speaking of
(35:11):
spots in the sky. This is another fun alien story
and it goes back to the fifties. What's up with
the photos with the flashes that might be alien spacecraft?
Speaker 2 (35:21):
How many people watch Project blue Book on the History Channel?
Did you watch that series? Like one of us? Okay? Cool?
So she lives in your house, so I know we
watched it together. So the rest of you go stream
Project blue Book on the History Channel. It's pretty cool.
It's a pretty good series, right, It's fictionalized version of
real characters, Okay. Project blue Book was an initiative started
(35:43):
by the federal government to investigate many many claims of
very intelligent people seeing alien spacecraft in fact, two consecutive
weekends over the nation's capital by hundreds of people, crazy
weird objects reported in the sky's Washington d C. Now
(36:04):
that's just a fact. Okay. You can come up with
all kinds of explanations, but that's the fact, and it
is not in question. It did happen. Okay. So the
interesting thing is there seemed to have been a spike
in the reports of unidentified flying objects across the world
during the nineteen fifties and into the nineteen sixties. Did
(36:26):
you see all those flying Saucer movies. That was a
reason they all got made in the fifties, because things
were a little weird. Well, now here comes a story
on space dot com. But I want to tell you
that the story on space dot com is based on
a scientific journal publication in a journal called Scientific Reports.
Scientific Reports is a portfolio of Nature. The journal Nature
(36:50):
sounds like clickbait to me. It is a peer reviewed,
scientific investigator per reviewed. Clickfait might be true, but we're
gonna go ahead and talk about it anyway. So here
it comes, all right. So, according to Scientific Reports, some
researchers think that some mysterious flashes that were recorded in
(37:14):
the imaging of Mount Palomar Observatory in the nineteen fifties
might actually be UFOs that you should react that way. Ye,
look and look, I know what you're thinking. And before
you go there peer reviewed Scientific journal. Here's why these
(37:39):
very conservative, very proof oriented scientists are beginning to say
very crazy things like this. They call these objects transient
star like objects, because that's how astronomers name things. There's
a black hole in this guy, what should we call it?
Black hole? There's a spot on the Sun. What's that
(38:00):
large red spot on Jupiter? Oh, the Great Red Spot?
All right, So what are these things in the Palamar plates? Well,
they're transient store like objects, Yes they are. Okay, So
the notion is this, Between the dates of November nineteenth,
nineteen forty nine and April twenty eighth, nineteen fifty seven,
(38:22):
there were one hundred and seven eight hundred and seventy
five appearances of these transient star like objects identified in
the now digitized sky plates from the Palamar Observatories. Now,
Mount Palamar was once the largest telescope on planet Earth.
It's California's one of California's finest telescopes. Even today, it's
(38:43):
still being used for research. It back then though, was
having photographic plates. They had a film camera on the
back of the thing. Right, So in recent times we
have digitized all of those film plates, and then very
recently a group of scientists began studying those digitized plates
and they found these little starlike objections and they're transient
(39:06):
because they're on one frame, but then a frame that
was taken an hour later, they're not there, and they
weren't there on the frame before the one frame where
they appeared. That's what it means by transient. They were
only there for a period of time. Now you might
be thinking this, this is what I was thinking when
I first read the story. Oh well, it's just some
kind of a you know, an effect of the camera
and it's kind of a light leak, or it's dust
(39:27):
or you got what baths for flying in front of
the telescope, something silly like that. Right, So transient it
means clean your lens. So yeah, it could mean actually
clean your lens. Well, here's another weird part about it.
All of those appearances, So all of those appearances, they
did not occur on eighty eight point five percent of
the images that were taken. So they're occurring on something
(39:52):
less than fifteen percent of the images. Right, here's the
next weird thing. When this team of scientists studied them,
they found a correlation that is really unusual. These transient
unidentified objects were sixty eight percent more likely to appear
in the images of the Palamar telescope within twenty four
(40:15):
hours after a nuclear weapons test. Just let that sit
in for a minute. There were one hundred and twenty
four tests from nineteen fifty one to nineteen fifty seven,
and these transient objects were sixty eight percent more likely
to occur on the day of or the day after
(40:38):
those nuclear tests. I would call that weird.
Speaker 5 (40:42):
What do you think that is weird? And it's interesting
that we might start nuclear weapons testing here again. And
you know we got an alien probe f line by
the sun coincidence you decided with it's blue light on,
ready to do some probing.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
That is one more thing, and I know we need
to wrap this story up for timesake. But the other
thing that's very interesting there is also a statistical correlation
with reports of unidentified flying objects at nuclear test sites
by human beings. So when people were reporting seeing unusual
(41:20):
things in the sky, Palomar was also picking them up
that scary music.
Speaker 5 (41:27):
I don't know, I think you scared me pretty well already.
So thinking hills have eyes and stuff with those nuclear
sites and the aliens involved and gets crazy.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
So according to this team reporting in Nature, the overall
findings of the study support hypotheses that transient exhibit The
transients exhibit some degree of association with both nuclear testing
and reports of what are now called UAPs unidentified aerial phenomenon,
and the results further suggest these associations are additive with
(41:57):
the largest number of transient scene for dates then nuclear
testing windows and when uapiece were reported by human beings.
So sometimes in science we just go, huh, well, that's
a little weird. I'm not up here telling you, oh,
there's UFOs, they definitely exist. I'm just saying that. At
what we do with scientists is we take these really
(42:20):
highly unusual hypotheses and we try to begin to apply
tests to them to see if we can find correlations
like this, and so far this team has actually found them. Now,
there's one last thing I'm going to tell you. Remember
this is Halloweed Weekend. I'm going to tell you this
one last part of the story, and then we're going
to drift off into the next segment of the show,
which is this all of those transient phenomenon basically went
(42:45):
away in nineteen fifty seven after the launch of the
Sputnick spacecraft. That's an extra huh. I would drop this mic,
but it's expensive. So anyway, I just want to say,
sometimes science still works, friends, Science is still important, but
(43:09):
sometimes we run into this kind of a story where
we're saying, I think we need to look into that
a little bit more. Right, Wes and I were able
to do an interview with the gentleman by the name
of Lee Johnson, and Lee Johnson is the chief technologist
at Marshall Space Flight Center. Was a cool interview. We
have to do that. You want to convey what he
said about UAPs.
Speaker 5 (43:28):
Well, first we have to make sure that we mentioned
that he is no longer he retired and he's doing
some other things. And second of all, I own to
remind you, I don't remember exactly what he SAIDs I wanna.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
Leave it to you. I can help if you need it. Yeah,
put me in coach. Oh you did, Okay, here's what
he said. I remember that he was at Dragon con
That's all I remember, really, So Lee is also a
sci fi writer. Anyway, here's what you need to know.
The chief technologist and Marshall Space Flight Center. You can
listen to this yourself. It's on one of our podcasts
from earlier this year. He said this. Look, when I
was a kid, I like to believe in UFOs because
it was kind of fun, right, maybe interested in science,
(44:01):
maybe interested in space. But then as I grew and
I became a scientist and I really started in understanding
the scientific method, I understood that, hey, until we have
some kind of hardcore, hands on evidence, some kind of
evidence based claim, something that we can put to a test,
I'm never gonna believe in UFOs. But then I remember this. Yeah,
(44:27):
Then pilots of F eighteen aircraft flying out of San
Diego began to capture imaging on their thermal cameras and
on their video cameras of UAPs, and Lee Johnson, the
two technologist that Marshall Space Flight Center, said well, I'll
be darn. And then we had testimony on Capitol Hill
and we're still looking into things. So look, it's safe
(44:48):
to say this. Sometimes there's just things we don't know yet. Right,
and that's at least one of those things.
Speaker 5 (44:53):
And there have been stories we've covered. I think back
to Tabatha Starr and there's been these stories that we've
covered where we go, there's something weird happening and we
kind of wonder what it might be. And that was
a situation where there was something that was going on
and as they studied it, they eventually had an explanation
for exactly what it was. So but it's nice when
(45:13):
the science plays out with it. Well, the holiday season
is coming up fast, and you may have new pajamas,
maybe a family set of pajamas on your shopping list.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
You got to get those because you got to wear
the Christmas morning or Christmas Eve or both.
Speaker 5 (45:30):
Got to get them for that Christmas photo that you take.
And maybe your shopping list involves more than that. Maybe
you need new slippers, maybe you need a new robe.
Maybe that special someone in your life needs one of
those things. Or maybe it's about your bed sheets or
your bedding. Well, let's talk about Cozy Earth. Their Cozy
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of Stars Right after this, this is the portion of
(47:12):
the show where I normally we'll pitch things over to
Sean and we'll talk about whatever's happening next at the
Coca Cola Space Science Center. And in this case, because
we're recording this show, by the way, will be on
released on Thursday, when we normally release, so when we
actually have this available when it drops, as the kids say,
(47:36):
we won't necessarily be able to talk specifically about this
event that's coming up because normally we say, hey, what's
coming up next, Sean and then he talks about it. Well,
in this case, what's coming up next is literally in minutes,
and it's Astronomy Night, and we bring in doctor Rosa
Williams to talk about Astronomy Night and the fact that
just because you're listening on Thursday and you miss the
(47:58):
November first Astronomy Night doesn't mean there won't be more
Astronomy Nights coming up at Providence Canyon or back here
the home game at the Cocohola Space Science Center.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
Thank you very much, Wes, so.
Speaker 5 (48:10):
Talk a little bit about what you guys do here,
we kind of go over it. And also, I guess
there's another event happening on Tuesday in Music under the
Dome right here in this room, and I'll let Sean
talk about that in a minute, but first we want
to talk with Rose about what you guys do for
Astronomy Night when you guys are having that event, well,
when it's.
Speaker 6 (48:30):
A home game as I call them, when we're here
at the Coca Cola Space Science Center, we use this
planetarium to display some of the objects that are up
right now in the night sky and give you up
close and personal looks at a few of them. But
when we're at a dark site like Providence Canyon FDR
State Park something like that, we have a little PowerPoint thing.
(48:54):
We bring the portable projector and give a little talk.
But a large part of the night is just studying
the nighttime sky in places where city lights have not
drowned it out to the same extent as night happened
in Columbus.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Yeah, so doctor Williams tell us a little bit about
the observatory itself, the program within Earthen Space Science's department,
and some of the students are going through the program.
Speaker 6 (49:21):
Okay, So one of my titles is director of the
West Rock Observatory. And in the corner of this building
we have a big dome that contains a telescope with
a twenty four inch mirror our Pride and Joy, and
we have largely students using that telescope to take images
of the nice sky to do studies. We've had a
(49:42):
student do his own independent light pollution study. We've had
studies of variable stars. My colleague, doctor Andy Puckett, has
used these telescopes to track flying asteroids and comets and
try and determine their orbits to make sure they're not
straight for Earth.
Speaker 2 (50:02):
You want to talk just a little bit about the
recent NASA grant that was awarded to the observatory.
Speaker 6 (50:08):
So we found that there was a thing called Research
Initiation awards that NASA does, and we said, hey, we'd
like to initiate some research here with our big telescope.
So we wrote a proposal that suggested that we would
continue our studies of flying asteroids and also add to
(50:28):
that the nuclei of active galaxies. That's the Quasars word
that Sean is so fond of.
Speaker 5 (50:38):
We just need to say asterism, and we've covered all
three from the disclaimer at the beginning of.
Speaker 2 (50:43):
The show asteroid work. There you go. That's good.
Speaker 5 (50:47):
So with that event taking place in just a few minutes,
and we had told you guys maybe we'd have some
time for questions, but we are not going to have
time for questions, So no chance to stump the band tonight,
because more folks have been coming in getting read four
Astronomy Night, and we appreciate you guys for joining us
that have just come in. But before we do that,
I want to talk about music under the Dome. It's
(51:07):
a special event that you guys do right here in
this room. And someone who came in and asked me,
why is there a piano in here? And I was like, well,
we'll get to that. So we're getting to that now.
Speaker 2 (51:17):
All astronomers like to have pianos around. It's it's just
a rule. No. So there's a quarter of a million
dollar grand piano sitting behind me that belongs to the
schwob School of Music here at Colymus State University. And
the cool thing is they come and actually perform concerts
in this space. And then what we do is we
have space artists, including our own planetarium director, mister Lance Tankersly,
(51:38):
that developed space art that is choreographed to the music
that is about to be played by those music students
and faculty from the Shop School of Music. That is
a concert event that is unlike any other that I
personally have ever seen. It's called Music under the Dome.
The next one of those is this Tuesday night. Now.
For those of you on the podcast, sorry, pick us
up next semester. There'll be another one and they'll come
(51:59):
it in March. Yeah, But for those of you who
are actually live in the room, there's still time for
you to attend that. There will still be some tickets
available for that Music under the Dome concert. You can
refer to our website here at the Space Science Center
to find out about that. I can tell you this,
it's simply one of the most amazing concert experiences that
I personally haven't ever been a part of because these
musicians are so fantastic, the graphics are so engaging and amazing,
(52:21):
and you get to be right here in this beautiful
auditorium and be a part of Music under the Dome.
Make sure you see one of those concerts. The last
one for this semester will be on Tuesday night, but
then there's three of them in the spring semester, so
you can jump in and see one of those concerts there.
And I would just like to take the closing seconds
here to say thank you to our department chair, doctor
Troy Keller for arranging this special edition of our Native
(52:44):
Stars podcast here on our Astronomy Night. Let's give Troy
around applause.
Speaker 5 (52:51):
And we usually close out the show with me just
saying that we thank you for listening, but we really
do appreciate all of you that are in the room.
Give yourself around of a pause or not caring about Georgia,
Florida and Sean and I will do this again next week, susdiot.
(53:15):
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Warning. The following podcast contains an entertaining look at astronomy, physics,
and space news throughout the known universe. Listeners have been
known to learn about astronomical phenomenon, the scientific method, and
expanded vocabulary to include terms like quasar asterism and uranus. Listen,
that's your own risk.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Go ahead. When Made of Stars, made them Stars.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Made When Maida Stars Media, you could be from high
they would New Mexico, Mars.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
We're on.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Stars, Whens, Welcome to Made of Stars Live.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
There we go.
Speaker 5 (01:04):
This is our first run at doing a show live
in front of an audience. I am seated here next
to my good friend, doctor Sean Cruise, an executive director
of Columbus State University's Coca Cola Space Science Center, where
we are set up doing the show live on a
Saturday night during a college football game of some import
to at least some people in town.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
No one in this room. And I am Wes Carrol.
Speaker 5 (01:27):
I'm just he's the executive director and an astrophysicist and
all that fun stuff. And I'm Wes Carol, just a
nerdy guy who got into broadcasting and likes all of
this space stuff. So here we are ready to do
a show for you guys. Thank you guys for being
here tonight. We thought, with the invitation of doctor Troy
(01:47):
Keller and the Department of Earth and Space Science has
invited us to do this show in a different format,
and we thought, well, why not do it here in
this particular venue, in this particular room here at the
cocolasp A Science Center.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
So with that, I welcome in Sean and Sean. Here
we are.
Speaker 5 (02:04):
It's finally here. Made of Stars, Live Wells. We've been
talking about this for quite some time.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
We didn't know exactly how this was gonna go, but
right now I think it's going swimmingly. So far, so good,
Absolutely swimmingly and waiting to use that word all week swimmingly. Well,
I've got a.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
Word we're gonna use in a few minutes quite a bit,
and it's not a word we say a lot on
this show. Aliens. We're gonna get to aliens in this show.
So we have two alien stories somehow, and it's not
the movies. We've talked more about the alien movies, I think,
than actual aliens on the show over the years. But
(02:43):
we have two like legit alien stories.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
I mean they are legit that's the thing. We try
to keep a high level on this particular podcast for fact, right,
and we try to say we try to in fact,
one of the things we like to tell our audiences is, hey,
that's clickbait. Don't pay any attention to that, right. But
yet I find ourselves in this position west where we
have two alien stories on the same podcast.
Speaker 5 (03:07):
We also don't typically talk about politics, and we're going
to start with a story that involves politics.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
We are allergic to politics this on this podcast.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
I mean, we avoid it as much as we can,
but it does sometimes roll into this, just like aliens
sometimes roll into what we do, and they're really like
they may even be just zooming right into it apparently.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
But we'll get to that coming up.
Speaker 5 (03:31):
Let's start with this, this story, this one that touches
on politics, because it's about a very special artifact that
is supposed to be preserved forever as is, and we
have people that want to chop it up and move
it around.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
What we want to do in the museum industry is
we want to take artifacts that were essential parts of
the American space program here at Space Science Center and
preserve them literally for all time if possible, Right, at
least as long as they're in our care. We want
to take care of the pieces that you see out
in the gallery of this very facility so that the
next generation can know and understand and see and have
(04:11):
a tactle experience with actual artifacts. Well, when the American
Space Program decided to shut down the shuttle program, the
Space Shuttle program, they did this, they said, look, we're
going to give the four existing space shuttles away, and
the Space Shuttle Endeavor was given away to the California
Science Center. California Science Center is going to be a
(04:31):
fantastic vertical display of that particular shuttle. They're working on
that right now. Then the Space Shuttle of Atlantis was
given away to the Kennedy Space Center's Visitor Center. I
don't know if you've been down and seeing that. That's
one of the greatest museums in America. Quite frankly, friends,
and Space Shuttle Atlantis is tilted. It's on kind of
an interesting pitch the way they tilted it to display it.
(04:53):
And then of course there's the Space Shuttle Endeavor. I'm sorry,
that's in California Space Shttle Enterprise, which never went to space,
but it was doing drop Tests that sits on the
Intrepid Air and Space Museum. That's an aircraft carrier in
the Harbor in New York City. Okay, So all of
those were put in displays where there were some liberties
that could be taken into to make them attractive, to
(05:14):
make them exciting. But the one that they wanted to
actually preserve like a time capsule was Space Shuttle Discovery.
That's the one that they wanted to keep intact as
original as they possibly could. They gave it to whom
the Smithsonian. Right, so it is in the Udvar Hazy
Center in Washington, d C. That's near Dulles Airport. It
(05:35):
is being preserved for all time, making sure it stays
as original as it possibly can for all time. Break
out the chainsaws. Until recently, you see, there was a
certain piece of legislation that was passed had the initials
OBBA of three b's OBBBA. That's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, friends.
(06:00):
And in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, there is
finances to take the Space Shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian
to the Johnson Space Space Center Houston to put on
display in Houston, Texas. Now, look, Johnson Space Center is
headquarters of the astronaut program. I think they probably should
(06:23):
have had a shuttle when we were dealing out shuttles, right,
they probably should have gotten one. It was probably a
political baseball at that time that they didn't get a
shuttle to put on display.
Speaker 5 (06:35):
I mean, if you're handing out shuttles and they were,
you know, you would think Johnson would at least be
able to.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Get a space shuttle, and you get a space shuttle,
not you, Johnson Space Center.
Speaker 5 (06:47):
So part of the complication with this is that they
used to have this method of transporting the shuttles. It
would piggyback it on top of a shuttle transporter.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
It was that aircraft. If you want to see a
model of this right out in front of the the
nose of our Space Shuttle Odyssey out in the exhibit
gallery looking at a case, there's a model of space shuttle
sitting on the back of a Boeing seven forty seven,
which is the transport plane. They could fly these shuttles
around back then. But see the problem is they have
now mothballed all of the seven forty sevens capable of
(07:17):
carrying a space shuttle anywhere. So how do you get
a shuttle from Washington, DC to Houston, Texas. It requires
a chainsaw. Friends. Yeah, so that's the plan. The plan
is to cut up Space Shuttle Discovery, the one pristine,
keep it the way it was for all future generations.
(07:38):
They're going to chop it into pieces and mail it FedEx.
Speaker 5 (07:42):
I don't know, so, I mean, I'm just sitting here
trying to understand, Like, did they miss the memo.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
About preserving it? Yes, Okay, I'm gonna go at that.
Answers that. So, so, okay, what did the Smithsonian do? Well?
They started an effort to try to stop this happen. No, no, please,
don't do this. There's a reason it's here. We want
to preserve it. Okay. So, the latest Space story this
week regarding this whole situation is that John Cornyn Ted Cruz,
(08:13):
both Senators, and Representative Randy Weeber from Texas have actually
they've actually reached out to the Department of Justice to
investigate the Smithsonian for violations of the Anti Lobbying Act
using federal dollars to lobby for their cause. And see,
here's the problem. The problem is now we have US
(08:36):
senators basically taking legal action against the Smithsonian so that
the Space Shuttle Discovery can be chopped up and sent
in pieces to the Johnson Space Center.
Speaker 5 (08:46):
So there's no way to put this on Like, it's
too big to put on a truck, it's too big
to transport on a train, it's too big to transport
on anything else. It has to be disassembled.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Yeah, yes, and then that would leave no pristine models
left because we've allowed these museums to do all these
kind of creative things with it. See the problem. And again,
I'm not up here saying, oh, this party's bad or
that party's bad. Johnson Space that probably should have gotten
a Space shuttle, right. All I'm saying is, are we
really gonna cut up Space Shuttle Discovery with a chainsaw?
(09:21):
Are we really gonna do that? America? Apparently apparently we're
moving toward.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
Yes.
Speaker 5 (09:28):
I mean, it was just Halloween yesterday as we're recording this,
So if you're gonna start hacking up stuff with chainsaws,
it seems like it tis the season, just not that.
So is what is ultimately where this is gonna head?
Do we think it's gonna actually make it to Johnson
or do we I mean, is this well.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Political tides right now would say yes, right, And so
we don't really know. Because it's twenty twenty five America.
Things are a little strange, right, But it's leaning toward
the momentum is that it looks like it's problem going
to get moved, and the only one way to move
it is to cut it up. When you think.
Speaker 5 (10:03):
About emergency preparation, what comes to mind. Maybe some flashlights
and some extra batteries, maybe a first aid kid. Maybe
you've even thought as far as some freeze dried food.
I don't know how far you've thought. I know the
things that I think about when I think about emergency preparation,
(10:24):
and I can tell you this, the folks at prep
starts now dot com have thought of all of it.
Not only when you go to their website can you
join their mailing list and get a prep Starts Now
emergency planning guide. They also have a prep blog full
of ideas and things that probably never cross your mind.
(10:45):
And as you look through the site, you also notice
there's a lot of other things that never would have
crossed my mind, whether it's vitamins and supplements, whether it
is ways to filter your own water, plenty of first
aid essentials that you're gonna need. Of course, that freeze
dried food is there for you as well, but how
about things like camping gear, tactical gear, emergency essentials that
(11:07):
you need for your car to keep it running, the
things that'll keep you alive for seventy two hours in
a crisis, and not just you, but also your family.
You don't want to be scrambling to try to figure out, well,
what do I do? You want to know that you
are prepared. So I have good news for you if
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(11:28):
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(11:53):
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Prep starts now dot com More.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Made of stars.
Speaker 5 (12:06):
Right after this, let's talk about Jupiter. I always like
(12:32):
when we get one of these stories that really connects
to the marvel of our Solar system, why it's unique,
why it's special. And I know we got alien stories
coming up, and we're going to talk about the possibility
of things, you know, outside of our Solar System and that.
But we always regularly on this show, and there's a
(12:53):
lot of discussion about the fact that, you know, we
have these exoplanets in places that sometimes are in that
log zone, that area where you say, you know, it's
the right temperature, it's the right circumstance, right distance from
its star, that it could host life. But there are
so many different factors in our Solar System that allow
(13:14):
us to be here and to function. The Moon plays
a role, and we're learning a little bit more about
Jupiter's role.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
So Jupiter is a very important planet for life on Earth.
We knew that to some degree already. One of the
things it does is it sweeps up a lot of
debris coming in from the outer Solar System, particularly in
the early history of the Solar System, and keeps those
pieces from bombarding the surface of our planet in the
inner part of the Solar System so that we can
(13:41):
have a long, long enough span of time to have
life on the surface of the Earth. But a new study,
and by the way, this is from a story on
space dot com if you want to check it out.
A new study out of Rice University in Houston says
this that Jupiter's role was even more important than we
previously thought because Jupiter's big I don't know how many
(14:03):
people here had a big brother in school that kind
of looked out for you at school, I did, you're
raising your hand? Remember this, The radio show makes the noise.
If you had a big brother, it makes the noise. Yeah, okay,
a few of us, all right, So that's good. So
Jupiter was kind of like our big brother. And when
we got in trouble at school, Jupiter would pop up
and he would say, I'm gonna take care of you.
(14:23):
So what Jupiter did was the gravitational mass of Jupiter,
which formed relatively quickly in the early part of the
Solar System, was so extensive and so strong that Jupiter's
gravity managed to carve gaps into the giant disc of
material swirling around the proto Sun in the very early
part of the universe. And it turns out that these
gaps were absolutely necessary to prevent the building blocks that
(14:48):
formed our planet, also the planet's Mars, Venus, and Mercury,
from simply just plummeting into the Sun. In the early
part of the Solar System, that gravitational carving up of
the disc of material around the protosun. In a new study,
it's been shown that it was absolutely essential to provide
a cutoff of flow of gas and dust that would
(15:09):
just simply fall in through the inner part of the
Solar System and right into the Sun. Instead, what happened
is that Jupiter caused basically a resonance pattern throughout the disk.
So you have these lumps of rings of material that
acted as kind of like a traffic barrier, a slow
down in traffic that held up that material from fast
falling into the Sun that allowed it to hang around
(15:31):
in a more stable orbit long enough to form those
planets on the inside. Now, the team out of Rice University,
they were verifying this using computer simulations, and so they said, well,
we're going to run simulations and see what happens. And
so their computer simulations showed these shapes and structures in
the Solar System forming specifically because of the gravitational influence
(15:55):
of those gas giant planets. So see, if you want
a rocky world like Earth in that special part of
the Solar System that we call the Goldilock zone, it's
just right, not too hot, not too cold, it can
have life on it because it's just right all those conditions.
Then you're probably going to need a giant gas giant
planet like Jupiter out there to cause these resonances and
(16:17):
ripples within that proto planetary disc to allow those small
planets to form in that Goldilock zone. So a quote
from Andrea Isidoro, who is one of the co authors
co leads on the study, said, this Jupiter didn't just
become the biggest planet. It set the architecture for the
whole inner Solar System, and without it, we might not
(16:37):
have had Earth as we know it. So see, when
we talk about the fact that we're made of stars,
you're born of star stuff, right, It's more than just that.
It's more than just those elements that were composed of
being formed in some distant supernova and then gathering in
a cloud. There had to be so many different conditions
(17:00):
that happened in a just right sort of way to
even allow the planet that we have to be in
that habitable zone and then to be just right for
the conditions for life to be on the surface. It's
actually kind of incredible. And now that we know that
the traffic jams caused by Jupiter in the inner early
Solar System was just one more piece of this intricate
(17:22):
puzzle of making our part of our Solar system habitable
so that we could be here tonight and hang out
in the planetarium.
Speaker 5 (17:30):
Yeah, I noticed you mentioned Earth, Venus, and Mars. I
think mercury in there as well. How does Uranus fit
into all this?
Speaker 2 (17:40):
It's on the outs, okay, just checking.
Speaker 5 (17:42):
I always have to get in the occasional reference to Uranus.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
One last thing before we go to Uranus. One last
thing that we want to talk about is that we
actually see these ridges and ripples in newly forming star
systems around other stars. So it gets predicted on a
computer simulation at Rice University, and then some person with
a telescope like doctor Williams goes out there and starts
observing the sky and they actually see the same thing
(18:10):
that the computer models predicted for real around some other
distant protostar. Friends that's what I think science is beautiful. Right,
That's when science that is at its most elegant. It's
when we can use our computer simulations and our insights
about the mathematics and about the forces of physics involved
(18:32):
to say, oh, well, look, this condition should exist, and
then we go out and actually see that condition in nature.
That is the miracle of predictive science. And it's a
pretty darn cool thing.
Speaker 5 (18:48):
So you mentioned science and the beauty of it, So
that leads us to aliens.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Now we're gonna talk about aliens. We're gonna talk a
lot about aliens.
Speaker 5 (18:57):
So this is something that has been in it It's
been a clickbait story, but it's also got some teeth
to it. And that's what's so weird about it. We've
been doing this show and I mentioned before we started
the podcast to our our audience here. I didn't say
the show is recorded in front of a live audience
(19:18):
like they used to do on old TV shows. I
should have done that. But the fact that we've been
doing this in some form since two thousand and seven,
and we don't often get opportunities to talk about things
like aliens.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
But it's kind of become like.
Speaker 5 (19:33):
We had these phases where like they were talking about
it in Congress and we're like, wait a minute, this
is a real thing. Now we have to cover it
in some capacity as space media. And now this is
another one of those things where we have this comment.
It's come from outside of our solar system, and it's
(19:54):
acting kind of strangely. It's not acting the way other
comments have acted, or really anything in our solar system
has acted. And we've got some people that have said
hang and smart people that have said.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Hang on, you mean not like us. That's what I'm saying,
hang on.
Speaker 5 (20:11):
Maybe this could be something that is, you know, alien
in nature, and it could be some kind of a probe.
And then suddenly, you know, you see it at first,
and I know that you get the texts from people
that say, wait a minute, what is this? Sometimes those
texts come from me, but usually I kind of know
where to dig and find out any legitimacy to it.
(20:33):
And I remember texting you going.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
This is almost has some truth to it. What's going
on with this? So? Yeah, how soon before we're taking
over and we all die? It's like Tuesday, I think, okay,
so perfect act Accordingly, I'm just going to say.
Speaker 5 (20:48):
Yeah, I mean, maybe they'll let us make it to
the holidays, and then we can get into the new
year and.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
They might want to come to the holidays. They may
they invite an alien to your holiday. I think it's
a good thing to do. It is nice. So let's
talk about three I at lists. All right, So three
I means there was a two I means there was
a one eye. You can go ahead. I'm just gonna
let that hang in the air. What does I stand for?
It stands for Interstellar, great movie, which was it was?
(21:16):
It was okay, I mean it was pretty good. If
you're under selling it, buddy, I mean Kip Thorne wrote it.
It's about quantum mechanics. It's it's pretty cool. Yeah, all right,
but that's a big level of entry for most people. Yeah,
it's just okay, all right. So what was three I? Well,
three I stands for the third interstellar object that we've
ever discovered. That's wait, friends, don't miss this part of
(21:41):
the story. You live in a time where we now
know for certain that objects from outside of our solar
system are passing through our solar system. This is only
the third one ever discovered. What was the second one
two I two I was called two I Borisov, and
(22:02):
that was just a couple of years ago that two
I Borisov was found. And then the first one was
one eye, and one eye was called Omua Moua twenty seventeen.
So the very first object that we ever knew that
was coming from a star somewhere else, not our own son,
a star system outside of our own solar system, was
(22:23):
in twenty seventeen. So you live in a pretty cool time.
Don't miss that part of the story, right, it's pretty neat.
So within that just few years, less than a decade,
we have now discovered three objects that we know for
certain came from beyond the confines of our own solar system,
and they zip through and we got to study them,
(22:44):
and we got to understand that they're a little bit
different than some of the comments in our own solar
system or some of the objects in our own solar system.
All right, So Omuamua was one eye, Borisov was two I.
This is three I three I atlas. Okay. Now, doubtless,
if you're on any of social media or heck media
in general, you have probably seen stories that there's this
(23:05):
physicist from Harvard, who is telling everybody, I think this
is an alien probe. Now listen, the gentleman's name is
Avi Lobe. Avi Lobe is not unintelligent. He's a very
smart man, and he's offering up an alternative viewpoint. And
in science, that's what we do. We say, hey, crazy idea,
(23:28):
here's my crazy idea. And then we say, okay, well,
can we either verify your crazy idea or can we
give you seven reasons why your crazy idea couldn't possibly
be true, or even one reason for that matter. And
so that's what science is all about. Science is about
somebody throwing up an idea and saying, I think this
is true because I've got a couple of maybe incomplete
(23:51):
pieces of evidence, but I think they might lead to
this unusual conclusion. Well, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. So
the rest of the scientific community engages and they say, oh,
that's an interesting idea, but you haven't thought about X,
and you haven't thought about why, and you haven't thought
about Z, and all of those reasons deny this thing
(24:11):
that you're talking about. Okay, So in the last last
couple of weeks a few weeks, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Lobe
has suggested that this mysterious object called three I Atlas
is indeed an interstellar object, maybe even an alien probe.
As Wes said, he's more comfortable with the word probe
than I am.
Speaker 5 (24:31):
Well, I was just going to say probe an alien
doesn't usually bode well. And all of the the stories
and you know, especially like you know, rural Kansas and places,
so whenever they start talking about that, I get really uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
I have family in Kansas. Yeah, so we'll see, you know, Yeah,
I'm aware. So uh.
Speaker 5 (24:53):
I mentioned that it's not behaving the way that a
normal object in our solar system would behave.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
So we go through this process.
Speaker 5 (25:02):
This is where you're talking about sciencing it and going
through this whole process of trying to figure out what's
there what's not. There's been this suggestion about, well, what
if it starts to behave this way or it starts
to do you know, certain things that what might indicate
it's not behaving normally and some of the abnormal things
(25:24):
are happening.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
You've got to understand this about three I Atlas. It
was only discovered in July of this year, right, so
we have only known about it a very short period
of time. The other thing is right now, well maybe
forty eight hours ago, forty eight hours ago. Right now,
it's passing its nearest pass to the Sun, which we
call perihelion. And when a comet, if it is a
(25:47):
it acts a lot like a comet, by the way,
But when a comet passes near the Sun, that's the
most engaging moment for that comet and it's orbit around
the Sun, because in that period of time and it's
nearest to the Sun, it is at its highest temperature,
and it's at its highest velocity, at its highest gravitational
shear from the Sun, and so things begin to happen.
(26:08):
It begins to sublimate or lose material, it begins to
have its structure kind of challenged or rearranged by that
gravitational torque of the Sun itself. And that's when we
can tell, you know, if it acts like a comet,
or if it acts like something else. I will tell
you that. The headline from ScienceDaily dot com, where I
got the story says, this comet visitor is baffling scientists.
(26:29):
I just love these words. Right, It's just like anytime
I see the headline scientists are baffled, Troy, how many
times you've been just baffled? That? Never ever, Troy never
gets baffled. So but listen, there are some things that
you should know about this that are in fact baffling.
This comet is weird, make no mistake. Three I Atlas
is strange, not because it's a daily in spacecraft, but
(26:51):
because of the things I'm about to tell you. First
of all, it's moving at two hundred and forty five
thousand kilometers per hour, which makes it that's fast. It's
just faster than my Toyota Tacoma. It's the fastest known
object to ever be observed in the Solar System. Ever,
it's on what's called a hyperbolic orbit. That's one of
(27:12):
the ways that we know that it came from outside
of our Solar system. Number Two, it's enormous by comet standards,
or particularly interstellar comet standards. It is twelve point five
miles across. It's the size of the island of Manhattan.
Borisov was only six tenths of a mile across. A
(27:34):
Muahmua was only a quarter of a mile across. This
thing is twelve and a half miles across. It's really
really big, much bigger than those other ones.
Speaker 5 (27:42):
They know the size because the naked cowboy was on it,
just playing his guitar.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Manhattan. You mean yeh, yeah, yeah, I thought you meant
slim pickens from that, but yeah, okay. So it's also
likely an ancient object. We can tell which direction it
came from. We look that direction and say, well, what
star systems are over there, and then we give it
an estimate for how long it would have been traveling
in transit to get to our solar system, and we say, oow,
(28:09):
it's probably twice as old as anything in our solar system,
so it's truly ancient. It had a tail like a
comet outside the orbit of Jupiter, which is five times
more distant from the Sun than we are just safe
to say, if that number doesn't mean anything to you,
that's a long way from the Sun. Comets do not
(28:30):
generally generate a tail material streaming away from them at
a distance of five times the distance from the Earth.
That tells us it has a high content of CO two,
frozen carbon dioxide, dry ice, anything else unusual about the tail.
So there's another weird part of a tail story. That
happened when it got closer to the Sun, which it
(28:51):
began to have what's called an anti tail. It began
to have a horn out the front of it, basically
that pointed at the Sun. You see why comets have
tails stream away from the Sun is because of the
stellar wind blowing that material out away from the nucleus
of that common inner direction radially out from the Sun.
But this comment actually formed a forward facing tail and
anti tail. So that was a little bit of a
(29:13):
strange thing about The tail took of a unicorn factor.
It looks like it was kind of, you know, cord light.
It's not that we've never seen anti tails on commets before,
but they are a rare phenomenon. So that's another weird thing. Now, this, friends,
might be one of the most strange things. There's a
few other things you can get online and read about them,
but this is the really weird one to me personally.
(29:34):
It's coming in directly in what's called the ecliptic plane
the planets or but the Sun in a disc. You
don't have Jupiter going one way and Saturn going out
in a different direction, and Mars in a different plane.
All the planets kind of parade around the Sun within
a disc in the same direction. It's counter clockwise as
(29:54):
viewed from north. And that's because that's the direction of
rotation of the inner part of the Solar System. And
it was information. Okay, so a comment could come in,
particularly from another star system, at any random angle whatsoever.
But this object common Atlas three eye Atlas is coming
in almost exactly in the same plane as our planetary system.
Speaker 5 (30:17):
Alien navigators, which is one of the reasons that people
like Auvi Lobe say, well, now that's just too weird
to explain. I mean, because I want to tell you
the statistics for that are extraordinarily unlikely. How about that for.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
It to come from a different star system outside our
Solar system, but yet be in the orbital plane of
our planets, very very weird. So that's all of those
things together kind of get the attention of the scientific community, go,
this thing is not like anything we've seen before for
all of this myriad of reasons which I saw that
(30:53):
it's glowing blue. Now is that normal? I mean no, right,
so it is it's blue or in most comets. That's
another unusual characteristic. It has low iron nickel ratio it's
got way too much nickel weighed not enough iron, which
is also weird. And it's got a weird extreme negative
polarization of the light reflecting off it. If you want
to know more about that, ask me after the show.
(31:14):
I can tell you more about it. But there are
weird things about it that just don't seem to happen
with other comets, which is why it kind of triggers
the oh, we're not looking at an average comet instinct
within our personalities, and so it builds these speculations that
start to happen.
Speaker 5 (31:30):
Not everybody knows this, but blue is the universal color
for probe coming.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
And to think I almost wore blue tonight, I did.
I don't know what that means. I don't know. We
don't need to talk about that later, Wes. So we
have we've.
Speaker 5 (31:47):
Gotten some looks at it along the way, or we're
going to get some more looks at this thing.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Remember right now, it's close to the sun. That means
the only telescopes that can see it right now are
those telescopes that are pointed at the sun, and believe
or not, some of those sun facingelescopes that are made
to observe the Sun. They're sensitive of enough that they're
actually picking it up. This comet has also brightened at
a ridiculously strong and rapid rate, unlike other comets. Within
(32:12):
the next twenty four hours, it's going to be in
position to be observed by something called the Juice spacecraft.
Juice is a strained acronym by the European Space Agency.
Don't worry about that. It's a spacecraft that's on its
way out to Europa, which is one of the moons
around Jupiter. So the Juice spacecraft, though, is going to
be able to look at this comet tomorrow. So we're
(32:33):
going to get another better look now after it passed
around its closest past to the Sun. I would tell
you this if this story interests you, watch the news
over the next few days, because things are going to
begin to unravel rapidly in terms of data coming in
and us getting new looks at this object. We won't
actually be able to see it with earthbound telescopes until
the latter part of November and into early December. So
(32:56):
listen to the podcast. We will keep you up to
date on the weird three. I at Las comment.
Speaker 5 (33:00):
And I feel it's just only you know the good
that we mentioned this. If you you know your kids
have a home telescope, don't point it at the sun
to try to look at this thing. Never a good
idea or ever. Yeah, ever, but especially not now, because
they would really be concentrating looking for the blue thing flying.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Flying, see blue spots. That's not the comment.
Speaker 5 (33:20):
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(34:28):
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Speaker 2 (34:47):
More.
Speaker 5 (34:48):
We're Made of Stars right after this, Hey, speaking of
(35:11):
spots in the sky. This is another fun alien story
and it goes back to the fifties. What's up with
the photos with the flashes that might be alien spacecraft?
Speaker 2 (35:21):
How many people watch Project blue Book on the History Channel?
Did you watch that series? Like one of us? Okay? Cool?
So she lives in your house, so I know we
watched it together. So the rest of you go stream
Project blue Book on the History Channel. It's pretty cool.
It's a pretty good series, right, It's fictionalized version of
real characters, Okay. Project blue Book was an initiative started
(35:43):
by the federal government to investigate many many claims of
very intelligent people seeing alien spacecraft in fact, two consecutive
weekends over the nation's capital by hundreds of people, crazy
weird objects reported in the sky's Washington d C. Now
(36:04):
that's just a fact. Okay. You can come up with
all kinds of explanations, but that's the fact, and it
is not in question. It did happen. Okay. So the
interesting thing is there seemed to have been a spike
in the reports of unidentified flying objects across the world
during the nineteen fifties and into the nineteen sixties. Did
(36:26):
you see all those flying Saucer movies. That was a
reason they all got made in the fifties, because things
were a little weird. Well, now here comes a story
on space dot com. But I want to tell you
that the story on space dot com is based on
a scientific journal publication in a journal called Scientific Reports.
Scientific Reports is a portfolio of Nature. The journal Nature
(36:50):
sounds like clickbait to me. It is a peer reviewed,
scientific investigator per reviewed. Clickfait might be true, but we're
gonna go ahead and talk about it anyway. So here
it comes, all right. So, according to Scientific Reports, some
researchers think that some mysterious flashes that were recorded in
(37:14):
the imaging of Mount Palomar Observatory in the nineteen fifties
might actually be UFOs that you should react that way. Ye,
look and look, I know what you're thinking. And before
you go there peer reviewed Scientific journal. Here's why these
(37:39):
very conservative, very proof oriented scientists are beginning to say
very crazy things like this. They call these objects transient
star like objects, because that's how astronomers name things. There's
a black hole in this guy, what should we call it?
Black hole? There's a spot on the Sun. What's that
(38:00):
large red spot on Jupiter? Oh, the Great Red Spot?
All right, So what are these things in the Palamar plates? Well,
they're transient store like objects, Yes they are. Okay, So
the notion is this, Between the dates of November nineteenth,
nineteen forty nine and April twenty eighth, nineteen fifty seven,
(38:22):
there were one hundred and seven eight hundred and seventy
five appearances of these transient star like objects identified in
the now digitized sky plates from the Palamar Observatories. Now,
Mount Palamar was once the largest telescope on planet Earth.
It's California's one of California's finest telescopes. Even today, it's
(38:43):
still being used for research. It back then though, was
having photographic plates. They had a film camera on the
back of the thing. Right, So in recent times we
have digitized all of those film plates, and then very
recently a group of scientists began studying those digitized plates
and they found these little starlike objections and they're transient
(39:06):
because they're on one frame, but then a frame that
was taken an hour later, they're not there, and they
weren't there on the frame before the one frame where
they appeared. That's what it means by transient. They were
only there for a period of time. Now you might
be thinking this, this is what I was thinking when
I first read the story. Oh well, it's just some
kind of a you know, an effect of the camera
and it's kind of a light leak, or it's dust
(39:27):
or you got what baths for flying in front of
the telescope, something silly like that. Right, So transient it
means clean your lens. So yeah, it could mean actually
clean your lens. Well, here's another weird part about it.
All of those appearances, So all of those appearances, they
did not occur on eighty eight point five percent of
the images that were taken. So they're occurring on something
(39:52):
less than fifteen percent of the images. Right, here's the
next weird thing. When this team of scientists studied them,
they found a correlation that is really unusual. These transient
unidentified objects were sixty eight percent more likely to appear
in the images of the Palamar telescope within twenty four
(40:15):
hours after a nuclear weapons test. Just let that sit
in for a minute. There were one hundred and twenty
four tests from nineteen fifty one to nineteen fifty seven,
and these transient objects were sixty eight percent more likely
to occur on the day of or the day after
(40:38):
those nuclear tests. I would call that weird.
Speaker 5 (40:42):
What do you think that is weird? And it's interesting
that we might start nuclear weapons testing here again. And
you know we got an alien probe f line by
the sun coincidence you decided with it's blue light on,
ready to do some probing.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
That is one more thing, and I know we need
to wrap this story up for timesake. But the other
thing that's very interesting there is also a statistical correlation
with reports of unidentified flying objects at nuclear test sites
by human beings. So when people were reporting seeing unusual
(41:20):
things in the sky, Palomar was also picking them up
that scary music.
Speaker 5 (41:27):
I don't know, I think you scared me pretty well already.
So thinking hills have eyes and stuff with those nuclear
sites and the aliens involved and gets crazy.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
So according to this team reporting in Nature, the overall
findings of the study support hypotheses that transient exhibit The
transients exhibit some degree of association with both nuclear testing
and reports of what are now called UAPs unidentified aerial phenomenon,
and the results further suggest these associations are additive with
(41:57):
the largest number of transient scene for dates then nuclear
testing windows and when uapiece were reported by human beings.
So sometimes in science we just go, huh, well, that's
a little weird. I'm not up here telling you, oh,
there's UFOs, they definitely exist. I'm just saying that. At
what we do with scientists is we take these really
(42:20):
highly unusual hypotheses and we try to begin to apply
tests to them to see if we can find correlations
like this, and so far this team has actually found them. Now,
there's one last thing I'm going to tell you. Remember
this is Halloweed Weekend. I'm going to tell you this
one last part of the story, and then we're going
to drift off into the next segment of the show,
which is this all of those transient phenomenon basically went
(42:45):
away in nineteen fifty seven after the launch of the
Sputnick spacecraft. That's an extra huh. I would drop this mic,
but it's expensive. So anyway, I just want to say,
sometimes science still works, friends, Science is still important, but
(43:09):
sometimes we run into this kind of a story where
we're saying, I think we need to look into that
a little bit more. Right, Wes and I were able
to do an interview with the gentleman by the name
of Lee Johnson, and Lee Johnson is the chief technologist
at Marshall Space Flight Center. Was a cool interview. We
have to do that. You want to convey what he
said about UAPs.
Speaker 5 (43:28):
Well, first we have to make sure that we mentioned
that he is no longer he retired and he's doing
some other things. And second of all, I own to
remind you, I don't remember exactly what he SAIDs I wanna.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
Leave it to you. I can help if you need it. Yeah,
put me in coach. Oh you did, Okay, here's what
he said. I remember that he was at Dragon con
That's all I remember, really, So Lee is also a
sci fi writer. Anyway, here's what you need to know.
The chief technologist and Marshall Space Flight Center. You can
listen to this yourself. It's on one of our podcasts
from earlier this year. He said this. Look, when I
was a kid, I like to believe in UFOs because
it was kind of fun, right, maybe interested in science,
(44:01):
maybe interested in space. But then as I grew and
I became a scientist and I really started in understanding
the scientific method, I understood that, hey, until we have
some kind of hardcore, hands on evidence, some kind of
evidence based claim, something that we can put to a test,
I'm never gonna believe in UFOs. But then I remember this. Yeah,
(44:27):
Then pilots of F eighteen aircraft flying out of San
Diego began to capture imaging on their thermal cameras and
on their video cameras of UAPs, and Lee Johnson, the
two technologist that Marshall Space Flight Center, said well, I'll
be darn. And then we had testimony on Capitol Hill
and we're still looking into things. So look, it's safe
(44:48):
to say this. Sometimes there's just things we don't know yet. Right,
and that's at least one of those things.
Speaker 5 (44:53):
And there have been stories we've covered. I think back
to Tabatha Starr and there's been these stories that we've
covered where we go, there's something weird happening and we
kind of wonder what it might be. And that was
a situation where there was something that was going on
and as they studied it, they eventually had an explanation
for exactly what it was. So but it's nice when
(45:13):
the science plays out with it. Well, the holiday season
is coming up fast, and you may have new pajamas,
maybe a family set of pajamas on your shopping list.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
You got to get those because you got to wear
the Christmas morning or Christmas Eve or both.
Speaker 5 (45:30):
Got to get them for that Christmas photo that you take.
And maybe your shopping list involves more than that. Maybe
you need new slippers, maybe you need a new robe.
Maybe that special someone in your life needs one of
those things. Or maybe it's about your bed sheets or
your bedding. Well, let's talk about Cozy Earth. Their Cozy
(45:50):
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so you get it on both ends. You got the
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that comes in the colder weather months. And we have
teamed up with Cozy Earth to bring you an exclusive discount.
If you use codeword Wes WES in your shopping cart,
(46:17):
you're going to get a forty one percent discount forty
one percent off your purchase. It's an exclusive discount for
listeners to this show just by using the code word WES.
Just go to cozyerth dot com. Use that code WES.
Have your savings. You're also supporting the show by shopping
there as well. Enjoy your forty one percent off. Get
(46:40):
in there early so that that way you can have
them in time for Christmas. Cozyerth dot com more Made
of Stars Right after this, this is the portion of
(47:12):
the show where I normally we'll pitch things over to
Sean and we'll talk about whatever's happening next at the
Coca Cola Space Science Center. And in this case, because
we're recording this show, by the way, will be on
released on Thursday, when we normally release, so when we
actually have this available when it drops, as the kids say,
(47:36):
we won't necessarily be able to talk specifically about this
event that's coming up because normally we say, hey, what's
coming up next, Sean and then he talks about it. Well,
in this case, what's coming up next is literally in minutes,
and it's Astronomy Night, and we bring in doctor Rosa
Williams to talk about Astronomy Night and the fact that
just because you're listening on Thursday and you miss the
(47:58):
November first Astronomy Night doesn't mean there won't be more
Astronomy Nights coming up at Providence Canyon or back here
the home game at the Cocohola Space Science Center.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
Thank you very much, Wes, so.
Speaker 5 (48:10):
Talk a little bit about what you guys do here,
we kind of go over it. And also, I guess
there's another event happening on Tuesday in Music under the
Dome right here in this room, and I'll let Sean
talk about that in a minute, but first we want
to talk with Rose about what you guys do for
Astronomy Night when you guys are having that event, well,
when it's.
Speaker 6 (48:30):
A home game as I call them, when we're here
at the Coca Cola Space Science Center, we use this
planetarium to display some of the objects that are up
right now in the night sky and give you up
close and personal looks at a few of them. But
when we're at a dark site like Providence Canyon FDR
State Park something like that, we have a little PowerPoint thing.
(48:54):
We bring the portable projector and give a little talk.
But a large part of the night is just studying
the nighttime sky in places where city lights have not
drowned it out to the same extent as night happened
in Columbus.
Speaker 2 (49:12):
Yeah, so doctor Williams tell us a little bit about
the observatory itself, the program within Earthen Space Science's department,
and some of the students are going through the program.
Speaker 6 (49:21):
Okay, So one of my titles is director of the
West Rock Observatory. And in the corner of this building
we have a big dome that contains a telescope with
a twenty four inch mirror our Pride and Joy, and
we have largely students using that telescope to take images
of the nice sky to do studies. We've had a
(49:42):
student do his own independent light pollution study. We've had
studies of variable stars. My colleague, doctor Andy Puckett, has
used these telescopes to track flying asteroids and comets and
try and determine their orbits to make sure they're not
straight for Earth.
Speaker 2 (50:02):
You want to talk just a little bit about the
recent NASA grant that was awarded to the observatory.
Speaker 6 (50:08):
So we found that there was a thing called Research
Initiation awards that NASA does, and we said, hey, we'd
like to initiate some research here with our big telescope.
So we wrote a proposal that suggested that we would
continue our studies of flying asteroids and also add to
(50:28):
that the nuclei of active galaxies. That's the Quasars word
that Sean is so fond of.
Speaker 5 (50:38):
We just need to say asterism, and we've covered all
three from the disclaimer at the beginning of.
Speaker 2 (50:43):
The show asteroid work. There you go. That's good.
Speaker 5 (50:47):
So with that event taking place in just a few minutes,
and we had told you guys maybe we'd have some
time for questions, but we are not going to have
time for questions, So no chance to stump the band tonight,
because more folks have been coming in getting read four
Astronomy Night, and we appreciate you guys for joining us
that have just come in. But before we do that,
I want to talk about music under the Dome. It's
(51:07):
a special event that you guys do right here in
this room. And someone who came in and asked me,
why is there a piano in here? And I was like, well,
we'll get to that. So we're getting to that now.
Speaker 2 (51:17):
All astronomers like to have pianos around. It's it's just
a rule. No. So there's a quarter of a million
dollar grand piano sitting behind me that belongs to the
schwob School of Music here at Colymus State University. And
the cool thing is they come and actually perform concerts
in this space. And then what we do is we
have space artists, including our own planetarium director, mister Lance Tankersly,
(51:38):
that developed space art that is choreographed to the music
that is about to be played by those music students
and faculty from the Shop School of Music. That is
a concert event that is unlike any other that I
personally have ever seen. It's called Music under the Dome.
The next one of those is this Tuesday night. Now.
For those of you on the podcast, sorry, pick us
up next semester. There'll be another one and they'll come
(51:59):
it in March. Yeah, But for those of you who
are actually live in the room, there's still time for
you to attend that. There will still be some tickets
available for that Music under the Dome concert. You can
refer to our website here at the Space Science Center
to find out about that. I can tell you this,
it's simply one of the most amazing concert experiences that
I personally haven't ever been a part of because these
musicians are so fantastic, the graphics are so engaging and amazing,
(52:21):
and you get to be right here in this beautiful
auditorium and be a part of Music under the Dome.
Make sure you see one of those concerts. The last
one for this semester will be on Tuesday night, but
then there's three of them in the spring semester, so
you can jump in and see one of those concerts there.
And I would just like to take the closing seconds
here to say thank you to our department chair, doctor
Troy Keller for arranging this special edition of our Native
(52:44):
Stars podcast here on our Astronomy Night. Let's give Troy
around applause.
Speaker 5 (52:51):
And we usually close out the show with me just
saying that we thank you for listening, but we really
do appreciate all of you that are in the room.
Give yourself around of a pause or not caring about Georgia,
Florida and Sean and I will do this again next week, susdiot.
(53:15):
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