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Oh hi, it's Smologies. This is the first ever episode. I'm Ali Ward. These are small Ologies episodes delivering blue, tiny, bite sized brain snacks, little episodes that are refreshers on your favorites and classroom friendly, all ages cuts of Ologies episodes that you love. So I hear it from folks every day. I get messages, Yo, dad word, I see you have bleeped episodes, But what about making Ologies super family friendly? Can you change your whole vibe for Smologites?
And I can't. I love you, but I love the way I get to make the full length Ologies episodes that come out and land on your feed every Tuesday. But I did decide I can tweak what we have and release these clean, shorter edited versions as free bonus episodes so that when you see the Smologies title, you know that you can listen with your kids and my parents.
And Smologies are quicker, cleaner cuts of the back catalog favorites that are just perfect for my wheezy jog around the block, or your dinner prep or anytime you have about twenty minutes to burn and if you want the full scoop, all the juicy full episodes with more facts and backstories and words that we would not say around youngsters, you can find a link to that full version in
the show notes. So with that, welcome to Smologies, which are dropping twice today as a little honeymoon break debut this week, just kind of an introduction to our podcast Baby, and then Smologies will be out every other week on Thursdays as a bonus. So introducing somologies number one. Selenology a word that comes from the Greek sellen for moon, So get ready to bask in the glow of selenologist, raquel, new nomology.
Old.
Prologyology, schologies. So what exactly would you say when you introduce someone and say what you do? What do you tell them?
I tell them that I'm a planetary geologist. That's just what I say. And people usually have no idea what that means. They're like, I know geology, I don't know planetary what does that even mean? So then I say I'm a space geologist. I study rocks on other planets, and that's what I tell them, And.
Then they lose their minds and then they're like what does that?
What?
Yes, yes, that's what I do. So what does a space geologist necessarily do?
So I say that I'm actually an armchair geologist, So I sit on a chair and do geology.
You're reclining geologists, lining or geologists.
Yeah, so we we have samples from rocks and other worlds, but most of the time we don't. So I essentially use spacecraft data to analyze either images. I also do a lot of programming, so a lot of computational modeling of what's happening surface processes that are happening in other worlds.
And so you are crunching numbers and data to try to figure out what is happening with the rocks on other planets.
That's right, That's what I say.
That's crazy. Do all of the planets or just a few of.
The planets, just a few of the planets. So my two babies are the Moon and Mars. So Raquel got her bachelor's in geophysics and space physics, she got a master's inn geology, and she's now completing her PhD in geology in planetary science. Is all at UCLA do A lot of people tend to think that the Moon is
a planet. Okay that if you'd ask a planetary scientist, they would say, yeah, it's a planet because it acts like a planet, it behaves like a planet, but it's just orbiting the Earth versus orbiting the Sun. So it's not in the true definition of what a planet is. It's not a planet. Have to say planetary body because it's not technically a planet.
So it's a planet if it's orbiting the Sun.
That's right.
How do you guys determine what's a planet, what's an exoplanet? What's a planetary body? I mean, a planetary body is not orbiting a sun, but it could be orbiting another planet.
Well, a planetary body can be a planet as well. Oh okay, so the Earth is a planetary body, but so are asteroids. Asteroids are planetary bodies because they're orbiting. They're in our Solar system, so they're a planetary body.
I feel like it's kind of like a not all cack not all succulents are cactive, but all cacti are.
Yeah, yeah, something like that. So you have to be round, so you have to have enough gravity to have formed a around shaped object. So there's a lot of asteroids that are that look like potatoes or like weird dumb bell things, and those are not could never be planets because they're not shaped like a planet is. So you have to have enough mass that you create enough gravity to round out your your shape. You also have to have cleared your orbit and what that means is that
there's no debris in front of your behind you. You have collected all of the matter that's in your path to form yourself, to form the planetary body.
I don't think I've ever realized that we're kind of like a swiffer, Like that's part of where we get all of our stuff to make things is just by picking it up as we go.
Yeah, So it's actually interesting. We Earth acquires a lot of mass just by traveling through space. And when you see like meteor showers, that's us traveling through a trail of rocks of stuff that then encounters our atmosphere or that we encounter it and then they come crashing in beautiful light shows in the sky.
That's so exciting. Yeah, And have we always had the moon?
So the moon essentially, so the Moon formed very very soon after the Earth did so essentially, when you're thinking about geologic time, yes, the moon has always been here. With that, I talk to a lot of people and when I tell them what I do, Oh, you're an astronomer, Like, no, I'm not. I don't. I'm not an astronomer. I'm a planetary scientist. I study rocks. And it's funny to think that a lot of the rovers, like all of the rovers that have gone to Mars, they're all robotic geologists'
that's what they are. They're not astronomers. They're geologists.
Yeah they're not. They're looking down, they're not They're not right. Yeah, that's right, that's hot. Goss about the moon. Okay, explain to me where does this moon come from?
Yeah?
So the cool thing is actually we're not one hundred percent sure, which is really really cool. It's just how many science questions are still left answering. We don't know that much about the Moon. There's still so much more to learn. But the idea is the prevalent, the one that most people think is the real thing that happened was that a marsized object, which we call THEA, was just floating around space and crashed into the pro the
early Earth, and they collided and stuff. Kind of it was flung out into space and coalesced to form the Moon. When you look at what the Moon and the Earth are made of, they're very similar. They look like they're made of the same stuff. So we think that that's what happened. Things collided, they mix together, and then a big chunk of it got or several chunks of it got flown into space and then eventually coalesced into what our moon is today.
And it's gravity that's keeping it all together and into a ball.
Yeah, that's how planets get bigger. You start out with little dust particles that are electrically attracted to each other, and they start getting sticking together, and everything has mass. Even a tiny dust particle has mass, and so it starts attracting the next dust particle. And then now now you have little pebbles, and now the pebbles start getting stuck together, and then eventually you form a planet that's gravitationally bound to to itself.
So why on Earth aren't there more of these craters to which we can take road trips.
Our atmosphere protects us from a lot of them. If the rock is small enough, it'll just break up in the atmosphere, whereas on the Moon, there is no atmosphere. I'll just slam into the ground and it'll be left. There'll be a hole there. And that's actually one of the cool things about studying the Moon. The Moon has
experienced pretty much everything that the Earth has experienced. So and because it doesn't have plate tectonics and it doesn't have an atmosphere, it acts as a witness plate to everything that the Earth has experienced.
So that's why the surface of the Moon is pitted. But what about the Moon itself? Does it have a pit like a peach? What's of the Moon's core? Is it like a jawbreaker? Raquel says, it has a core, it's just much smaller than the Earth's.
One of the cool things that I think when I think about the Moon and the impact that caused it, was there was so much energy that collected from that original impact that formed the Moon that the entire Moon was just a magma ocean. So that's the Yeah, just imagine the whole Moon. No, just magma. Yeah, So that's what that's the prevailed theory. Here on Earth, we have
different types of rocks. We have igneous rocks atimentary rocks, whereas the Moon, it's essentially, all that light stuff is just one one thing, and the only way that you can form something like that is if it all just pretty much formed at the same time from the same stuff. And so we think it's just a big anortheisie crust except for the dark regions that you see on the moon, and those are ancient volcanic planes.
How big around is the moon comparatively? What's the size difference between the moon?
So if you were so, if the Earth were to be a basketball, then the moon is a tennis ball. Oh yeah, perfect, Yeah, done, amazing, That's how I like to think of it. Yeah, so the side nearer to us is actually the crust is thinner, so it's easier for lavas to bubble up. And so what you see when you look up those dark regions, we're just ancient lava planes that flowed and found a low place on the moon and just settle there.
And you can see more of those areas when the moon is full, which makes me wonder how do moon phases work? Just like, pretend I'm someone you met at the car wash. She doesn't know jack about the moon, because that's pretty much what's happening. But we're not at a car wash.
So the faces of the moon are caused by what we're seeing is where the sun is lighting the moon. So during a full moon, the sun is directly behind If you were to be staring at the moon and it's a full moon, the sun would be directly behind you. But the reason that there's if you see the full moon and it's not an eclipse, is because that there's a slight tilt to the Moon's orbit, so it's not perfectly in line with the sun, and so you see
the sun lighting up the full face of the moon. Now, when the sun, if you're again staring at the moon and you see only half of it lit, that means that the sun is to your either to your left or to your right. And when it's a new moon, when you don't see any light of the moon is because the sun is lighting the dark side of the moon, the far side, what we call the far side.
So it's always a full moon somewhere.
It just depends on where you're hanging out, that's right. Yeah, it's only our perspective that makes the phases of the moon happen.
How does the moon affect the oceans and maybe us, so the Moon has a.
Couple of effects on us. So it creates our tides, so high tide, low tide, that's from the it's the moon and the Sun. A lot of people think it's just the moon, but it's a combination of both. But the Moon is stronger because it's it's closer, so it pulls on our oceans depending on where it is on the planet, which area where on the planet's closest to, it's going to ug on that part of the planet.
So it actually tugs the rocks as well. It's not just the water, just the water is just easier to deform.
Oh my gosh, so it's tulling.
Yeah, So actually our earth is Yeah, our Earth is slightly oblate because we have the Moon tugging at it. The Moon and the Sun. Of course, then we tug at it. We tug at the moon as well.
Oh man, I'm going to have galaxy brain break down right now.
And the other way it affects us as it slows down our days. So the Earth used to be spinning a lot faster than it used to be, but because of conservation of momentum angular momentum, it has slowed down the Earth's spin.
So about every one hundred years, we get two point five milliseconds slower, and in twenty twelve we had to add a second to the world clock just to make up for it. Moon's like I did that. Likewise, Earth's gravity pulls on the Moon. The Moon slows down, and then the Moon becomes what's called tidally locked, so its orbit around us takes twenty eight days, and its own rotation takes about twenty eight days, which means that it's daylight for over thirteen earth days straight, Raquel explains. And
as you will hear, this was news to me. How does the moon work? So the far side of the Moon, what exactly is there? What's happening on the far side of the Moon.
More craters, Okay, less lava, much less lava. Most of the lava, the ancient lava fields are here on the near side. Like I said, the crust is thinner, so it's easier for lava to bubble up on this side. The far side. It just like a much lighter color to the Moon because it's mostly that Anorthas site that I was talking about earlier, and lots of impact craters side notes.
So yes, the light side is on the dark side, which is really the far side. So the far side has tons of craters and it's lighter in color and so far no alien communes. Now the near side is smoother and has darker splotches of basalt. Those are called mares because way back in the day folks thought they were oceans. Now the mares are flatter and they have fewer craters because it's younger terrain, so lighter parts a north to side rock called the highlands. The darker parts
are basalt, called the mares. Boom.
So Pollo sixteen landed on in the Highlands, at the lighter regions, but again they tried to look for a place that was nice and flatten on the ladder craters because it's safer for the astronauts and for the lander to land in. And then Apollo seventeen landed right on the edge between highlands and a mare because they were trying to sample the rocks from the two different places.
How many times have we been to the moon? Six We've been to the moon six times.
Yeah, there's water there. Do you know that there's wait, there's water on the moon ice water ice on the road? Yes, yes, where is it in these at the poles? There's these craters that never see sunlight. They're so deep that sunlight never actually enters the crater, so they have not seen sunlight for billions of years.
Oh my god.
And it's actually one of the coldest places that we've ever measured. The Solar system. Are inside these craters colder than the surface of Pluto.
No, no, yes, how cool? Is that? Literally? Very very cool?
So chilly.
Another reason the moon's cool is like there's lava caves. Do you know about the caves?
Caves?
I look like, Yeah, there's caves where we can set up human bases because they'll be shielded from radiation and from the cold and the heat because the sun, the sun heats up the surface a lot. So there's it's it's either very very hot or very very cold, depending on if you're in the shade or in the sun. How cold how hot we talk in oh man, In these permally shadowed craters, you can get down to fifteen
degrees calvin. So that's so zero kelvin is absolute zero, and you can I mean, this is just fifteen degrees higher than that.
Is very very very cold. So to put that in context with the thermometer on your porch or like your car's dashboard. Daylight on the Moon can get up to two hundred and sixty degrees fahrenheit, and at night it's a brisk negative two hundred and eighty fahrenheit. That's one twenty seven celsius at its hottest and minus one seventy three celsius when it's cold, which means if we do end up cramming ourselves into caves on the Moon, we're gonna need a lot of extra space just for scarves
and parkas for the thirteen Earth days of nighttime. Also perhaps some flip flops and a hibachi for those long days, and some sunscreen made out of magic. It's funny because you think of the Moon. I think the images we see of the Moon look relatively flat, and everything looks so dark that it just seems there's something like it just seems very inert. Oh like it must just be like tepid room temperature and everything very flat. That's just not what's happening.
I know.
It's it just wanders from hot cold hot cold, And so then we need to if we do set up bases there, we need to shield our astronauts from that. And I think caves are a good place to do it, or maybe inside some of these craters.
I mean we started in caves here. Yeah, that's a good point, right, Yeah, we should continue.
This is like the way to continue human exploration, to just find caves and go live.
And would you ever go to the moon if given a chance.
My opinion changes often Before I had kids, it's like, yeah, of course. And then I had kids, and I'm like, they need me, they need me here until they are the self sustaining, so like thirty, bring them to the moon.
I would.
I would be so happy if my kids became astronauts. I don't know why, Like it's it's super weird because it's probably not the safest thing for them to do, but to explore, I don't know, to become exploited. There's something so poetic and beautiful about, you know, pushing the boundaries of what humanity has done and can do do.
Her kids like the moon.
My little I mean, my my he's two and a half now, but I think ever since he was like a year and a half, he'll point to the moon and be like moon Moon. Because I think, like every night I set up the telescope just to look at the Moon like almost every night. It's I love looking at it, and it doesn't get old. Every time I look at that eyeps or through my cameras, it's just beautiful and I don't know, breasttaking to me every time doesn't get old.
Do you have favorite craters or mares or highlands?
I know the lingo, No, yeah, you're in it. I really like Copernicus Crater and Eratosthenes. And the reason why is they I think they pretty much set off the entire field of lunar science. So and how we study how things age and impact craters. So, Copernicus Crater is a bright, bright crater. So this is something we could talk about space weather. So if something is fresh, it's bright,
and as it's exposed to space weather, it darkens. So if you see something that's a crater that's very bright on the Moon, it's a younger crater than something else. And the reason we knew this is because so this crater, Copernicus Crater, has these crater rays, and crater rays are material that were ejected during the impact. You punch the ground and a lot of stuff comes up and then gets flown all over the place and creating these beautiful crater rays, and some of those crater rays went into
another crater. So that's how we knew that stuff that was bright must be younger than the stuff that is darker, because we have these rays that are going into these craters. So, and that's how we call the superposition, and a lot of dating on planetary bodies because we don't have samples from it get done through these crater counting and superposition principles of what is on top of something else.
So is it kind of like a paint drippings You can tell what's on top because of the splatter.
Yeah, okay, yeah, something like that. Yeah, And then we use samples brought back from the Apollo missions to sort of ground truth what we think the age of something is. So now you can create a curve of how many craters what does that mean for age?
Also, what's with this moon wobble that's in the news these days. Well, scientists in the seventeen hundreds discovered that the Moon's orbit does a little bit of a wonky dip every eighteen point six years, and for half of it the tides are a little lower and for the other half tides will be higher. So hunker down for that between twenty thirty and forty. Aren't we so thankful for a planetary scientists so much that we're donating to some of the ologists choosing since Raquel says, the Planetary
Society is doing great work. Their CEO is Bill Nigh and their mission is to introduce people to the wonders at the Cosmos and to inspire and educate people from all walks of life, so you can learn more about them at planetary dot org. And that donation we made was made possible by the following sponsors.
Virgin Media broadband is smooth. How smooth you ask, well, Imagine you're a big old Walruss and rather than lumbering around a glacier avoiding polar bears, you're on a lake, driving a speedboat three thousand kilos of mollusk, munching magnificence, feeling the wind in your whiskers.
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Okay, let's blaze through some questions. Are you ready for a lightning round? Okay, water The answer is yes, yes, you got this. Julie wants to know, will we ever know what's on the dark side?
So there's a spacecraft right now that's orbiting the Moon called LRO, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and it has taken spectacular, high definition, beautiful pictures of the entire Moon. And you can go to their website and find pictures of the dark So hour fire sight's not the dark side, the
far side of the Moon. The coolest thing is that I think those cameras have done They've actually imaged the Paula landing sites, so you can see the footprints and the rover prints that the astronauts left at the surface, and like the lunar module and the rover, it's still and you can see it. It's in the images that were taken by l Rock, the cameras on board.
Lro Christina SHOWI wants to know which theory on the origin of the Moon is your favorite.
The impact theory that thea hit early Earth and it formed the Moon.
But now here we are and here we are. Lettia McGinnis has a question that I'm sure so many people do, which is do the phases of the moon affect people's moods? You also worked a little bit in healthcare I did, or the airports. No, it doesn't because the phase the moon is still there. It's not any closer or any further. I mean, even if it does, like you wouldn't have enoughffect on us. It's just the sunlight. One paper on Martinez wants to know why don't we go back to the moon.
I know That's what I'm saying.
We should.
The moon is the next logical step.
I think it's right there.
It's right there. We can set up bases we can make things there, we can make fuel there. It's much less gravity, so it's easier to launch from there. It just makes so much sense to go to the Moon and not Mars, like it's harder to leave the Earth's gravity well, whereas it'd be so much easier to do that from the Moon.
Rene Couli wants to know who owns the Moon?
Nobody, Okay, it's so. There is a space treaty that was signed. I don't remember the year nineteen sixty seven, but it says that no one nation owns anything in space. Anna Thompson wants to know what is the biggest unknown about the Moon still or the coolest thing we've learned about the Moon?
Well, I think the.
Biggest sunknown is just how did it forms? It's so similar to our Earth and made it the same stuff, but you think it's a lot more it'd be a lot more different, but it's not. And the coolest thing I think there's water there.
There's Yeah, that's nuts. That's pretty cool. Bree Johnson wants to know do you think there will ever be a time where humans can live on the Moon? And Lindsey K. Trotter also asked can we be colonize this thing or what Yeah, for.
Sure, but I think that it'll be more of a jumping ground. You might go to the Moon first to acclimate or you know, not acclimate in the sense of acclimate to the weather, but acclimate to living and living space environment or not earth lighter gravity?
And how's the gravity on the Moon versus Mars.
A sixth so you could jump pretty high?
E Brown asked, I didn't even think of this question. How come you can sometimes see the Moon during the day?
So the Moon is always orbiting us, So sometimes it's orbiting us when it's nighttime and sometimes it's during it's daytime, So it's always either on our side during the day or on the other side. So it just depends on where it is on its orbit.
What's the best thing about what you do or the best thing about the moon?
The best thing is getting to think about these things that are so much bigger than myself. It takes me out of whatever is going on in my personal life or whatever is going on in the world. Just focusing on something that is just out there and it's so much bigger than us and bigger than whatever is happening in our world. Is kind of like a vacation in a way of everyday problems, and I think that that's what I love the most about it.
And we love Roquelle Nuno, selenologist and everybody's best moon friend and also a planetary geologist who has the word rock in her first name. It's amazing. Follow Roquel on Instagram and Twitter at the space Geologist. Her handle is linked in the show notes. We are at ologies. I'm at ali Ward with one L and since this is a shorty episode, you can find all the credits of all the amazing folks who work on the show in
the show notes too, and at aliward dot com slash smologies. Oh, one last thing before I go, some dad word life advice which I will cap every episode with. So sometimes when you're tired, are cranky, you're just thirsty. So if you're having a bad day, hydrate and see if that helps. Okay, go ask questions probie somologites, smology, olomologies, smologies.
Virgin media broadband is smooth. How smooth you ask? Well, Imagine you're a big ol'd war Russian and rather than lumbering around a glacier avoiding polar bears, you're on a lake, driving the speedboat three thousand kilos of mollusk, munching magnificence, feeling the wind in your whiskers.
And the sun on your big blubbery face. That's the kind of smoothness you feel. With ninety nine point nine percent broadband reliability available nationwide Virgin Media, It's playtime subject to locatal availability.
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