Jupiter's Cosmic Blueprint, White Dwarf Feasts & Chiron's Evolving Rings

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Brisbane Airport. So I've had six hours of driving today off the back of two nights of not much sleep. So if I seem less coherent than normal, and I appreciate I'm normally not that coherent to begin with, you know why, of course.

happening. so we've had everything in the last week we've had kind of almost tornadic storms, we've had hailstones the size of your fists, we've had under a kilometer an hour gusts and now we've got random cold that makes me feel like I'm back in the uk. So yeah, all happening. And this is why Australia is an interesting place to live even to the extent that with the

thunderstorms. We had got an email through yesterday that our wonderful observatory, Queensland's only professional astronomical observatory in Mount Kent was closed yesterday. We weren't allowed to go there because there was a bushfire within 10km of it that had been sparked by the lightning from the storms and fanned by the heat wave in a place that got lightning but no rain. So ah, it's all happening here.

hell of a lot of damage. And it's one of these that from a scientist point of view, fascinating watching it looking at the radar footage and all the satellite footage and on one hand you've got this thing of incredible exceptional beauty and on the other hand the devastation it's going to cause. So the people in the, in the firing line for that.

bounce and go around a bit. This one looks like it's not so much going to bounce a splat.

well as protecting us. So I've always got a bit of an eye on any study that says, hey guys, if Jupiter wasn't there, neither would we. But this is a really interesting one that looks an entirely different aspect of Jupiter, which is the role that Jupiter played on the formation and evolution of the early solar system, the formation of the planets. And I've actually been teaching planet formation this week to my undergrad

students. I've just, prior to recording this, had a two hour tutorial with them where I've been talking about planet formation and brought this story up because it really highlights the fact that when we often see in documentaries and the stuff we get taught at school, we get the impression that everything's solved, that we know the answers, that we know full well how the planets formed in microscopic detail and we've got everything figured out and the

Reality is that we haven't. We have a really good broad picture and we're getting better and better at understanding the processes that went on. But there's still a lot to learn. And part of that is that while we've known the solar system since the year dot, we've only known other planetary systems for the last 30 years. And in reality we're still learning an awful lot about the planetary

systems we find elsewhere. And learning about them is cool and all, but it also gives us insights that help us better understand our planetary system and how it formed. And that ties into this because the more we study those other planetary systems, the more we're getting observations of really beautiful things like planetary systems that are in formation, where you've got a

protoplanetary disk. And we're getting these gorgeous images from things like the ALMA array, the Ataccama Large Millimeter Array that shows disks of planet forming material around stars with gaps in them and ripples in them and bands in them, and all these beautiful structures. And some of these have been previous astronomy.

Picture of the days where this ties into the solar system is if you imagine that kind of stereotypical image of a protoplanetary disk, a disk of gas and dust around a young star like the sun, where material is feeding in through that disk to the star. So while the gas and dust is orbiting the star, there is this kind of sense of inward motion where the stars kind of nominating at the inner edge of the disk, materials falling in, and more material from

outside flowing in to replace it. Yeah, and some of the models of the formation of the solar system struggle to make the terrestrial planets as a result of that. Because the material in the inner solar system is destined to fall onto M the star. And how do you stop that happening to let that material hang around to actually form into planets? Now it's been pretty well established for a long time that the first planet that formed in the solar system and got to a good size

was Jupiter. And there's good reasons for that. It formed far enough away from the sun that the temperature was cold enough that the disk was rich in ice, which at, the distance the Earth is from the sun, all that ice would be gas. when you're forming solid objects, you need solid objects to feed from. And so when you've got a lot of ice, you've got a lot more solids. So things grow

quicker, there's a lot more to eat. And it's only when you get to about 10 or 12 times the Mass of the Earth that You're massive enough to effectively start gobbling up the gas as well. So Jupiter formed beyond this point called the snow line, where there's a lot more solid material. It got to grow really quickly. It grew quicker than things further out because the further out you go, the

slower things happen. So Jupiter was very much in the sweet spot, grew really quickly and eventually got big enough that it started clearing the gas and the dust it could gather the gas as well. And it opened up a gap in the disk. And that's very analogous to what we're seeing with these beautiful images from

ALMA places like this. So the team of researchers behind this work have run some really in depth computer modeling of the formation of the solar system formation of Jupiter, and showed that when Jupiter opens up the gap in the disk, its gravity will also have an impact on the inner solar system. It'll effectively create the gravitational equivalent of speed bumps, creating areas where the dust that's spiraling inwards can pile up and be stopped from traveling further in.

Effectively. It also creates a gap between the in run out of solar system that nothing crosses because if anything gets in that gap, Jupiter noms on it. And that's really interesting because some studies that have looked at primordial material we've found from in the solar system suggests that there is a bit of a chemical difference between material that formed in the inner solar system and material that formed in the outer solar system. So this gap dividing the two gives a natural way for that

to happen. But the really big exciting result from this is really that modeling of the structure that Jupiter would have imposed on the inner solar system. These kind of pile up regions where you get more m dust and debris than normal, the structures that, that would carve out ripples in the disk effectively and how that would then contribute to the formation of the

terrestrial planets. and therefore suggesting that not only did Jupiter help the terrestrial planets form by creating sweet spots where material could pile up, but it may also have had a really strong influence on the architecture of the inner solar system by setting where the planets would form, which then would go through a bit of a randomization phase as everything collides with each other. But it kind of possibly set

the blueprint for the inner solar system. And therefore, if Jupiter hadn't formed where it did and how it did, the Earth would look very, very different and we might not be here.

outside, it all starts going on. But what we're seeing is there's a commonality among a lot of the planetary systems that we find that look very different to ours. The thing that gives us a little bit of pause though, is that we have these observational biases that make us more likely to find systems that are different to ours than we

are to find systems like ours. And so you've always got that question of do we look unusual because we are unusual, or do we look unusual because we're not yet very good at finding places that look like home? and that's where colleagues of mine, like professor, Rob Wittenmayer, my colleague at unisq, have done really interesting work where what they do is look at what we found, but work out what doesn't exist

based on what we haven't found yet. So they can start getting an estimate of how common our, ah, planetary systems like ours based on the fact we haven't found them yet. And it's a really kind of weird type of science where the absence of finding thing places limits on

how common that thing is. So if you said that every star had a planet exactly like the Earth, on an orbit that's one year long that is exactly the same size as us and all the rest of it, then we can work out statistically, based on how good our telescopes are and our techniques are, how many of those planets we would have found. And we wouldn't have found anywhere near all of them because it's really hard to do. But

we'd have found X amount. And the fact that we've only found a very small number smaller than that places an upper limit on how common things can be. So you get this perverse science where you get the observations that tell us what we found and what we've seen, but you can also put inferences on what isn't there and what is there based on what we haven't found yet, which allows you to put limits on how common things are that you couldn't really find very easily. Which,

if that makes your head hurt. it makes my head hurt a little bit as well. But it's a really kind of clever use of the data we get to extrapolate further and draw more conclusions. And the net result of that is that the solar system is not hugely rare, but it's not common either. It's usual. And, that's really cool. And that probably extends to everything. Like I say, we're all individuals. The Earth, even though it's peeing it down outside at the minute, the

Earth's actually a very dry planet. If you took all the water off the Earth and made a little blob of it next to the Earth, that blob would be fairly tiny. And everybody views the Earth as being very wet, but I view it as being very dry because water is such a common compound in the universe. It's made of the first and third most common atom. You put them together. Yet water waters everywhere. So for the Earth to be as dry as it is is telling you a lot about the uniqueness of the

solar system. And maybe that's partially because of Jupiter. Not, necessarily shielding us from impacts, but preventing that icy material spiraling in, preventing us from becoming an ocean world. It's also partly down to the moon forming impact. The moon forming impact would have stripped a lot of the primordial Earth's water away because it walked as light and sits near the surface. So a lot about our Earth and a lot about the solar system is down to the random nature of

the events around us. When we formed the moon forming impact, a nearby star going supernova and lacing our solar system with radioactive aluminium. Things like this. There's all these oddities that made our solar system unique, but if those hadn't happened, other things would have happened and we'd have still ended up with something unique because of other random things happening. It's all fascinating and I just love this stuff.

And of course, as we just discussed, we now know that pretty much every star has planets. The expectation is that when the sun reaches this stage, unfortunately it's in about 7 billion years, so nothing to worry about. Immediately it will swell up and it will chow down on Mercury and chow down on Venus. They'll just be swallowed up and gone. Yeah, There is some debate over whether the Earth

will be swallowed up or will survive. Just all the models of star, evolution suggest that the sun will swell up to be about the radius of the Earth's orbit. But whether the Earth is there to nominal or not is still open for debate. It may be that the loss of mass from the sun in the time before may just mean that the Earth nudges far enough away to survive as a burnt husk rather than be devoured. It still would be ideal to be around when that wouldn't be pleasant.

I mean, that said, the Earth is going to become uninhabitable a lot sooner than that because the Sun's getting brighter and the Earth's oceans will boil and it'll all go downhill. But after all that process happens when the sun sheds its outer layers, that'll have a pretty cataclysmic event on the planets and the debris that are left. So suddenly the sun goes on the ultimate kind of

weight loss kick loses mass. And that will mean that all of the objects going around the sun will be held less strongly. And so therefore their orbits will move outwards because the gravity pulling them in gets weaker. Now, if you suddenly Press the button and vanished half of the mass of the Sun. What had happened is that the speed that any of the objects are going in their orbit will be too quick for that orbit to be

circular. So at that instant, at that point, they'd now be at their new perihelion, they'd be at their closest point to the sun, and they'd all move out onto much more elongated orbits with a longer orbital period, but orbits that would then cross one another. So if you imagine you lose half of the Sun's mass, Jupiter moves onto an orbit where its perihelion is 5 au from the sun, but its aphelion could be 15 au from the Sun. Saturn at the same time would have perihelion

at 10 au and aphelion at say 20 au. And I'm making the numbers up a bit here. So suddenly Jupiter and Saturn are on orbits that cross one another. Their orbits will probably still have the same ratio of orbital periods, so 12 years to 29 years. But they'd scale up to be something like, I don't know, 30 to 70 or something like that, because they've both moved out by the same amount. But suddenly you've got these planets that are on orbits that cross each other and

therefore can really strongly interact. They can stir everything else up because all of the objects in the asteroid belt, all of the objects beyond Neptune, this happens to everything. Now the mass loss is a bit more gradual than that in actuality. So what happens is you get the orbit spiraling out, but getting perturbed, being made more eccentric. You've also got these objects moving through the headwind of possibly half a solar mass of material being blown

outwards. That provides friction and so causes them possibly to spiral inwards a bit. Causes Jupiter potentially to gather mass as it numbs on all that gas that's going out. At the same time, its atmosphere is probably being blasted away by all this wind blowing past. All of this complexity means that you couldn't predict with absolute certainty what the solar system would look like at the end of this, but certainly

there'd be a period of chaos. A lot of stuff would survive, but it would survive on orbits that are now much more unstable. So you get a lot of material flung inwards and, some of that will be flung inwards far enough for it to impact on the Earth sized object in the middle and, for the white dwarf to get a snack. Now all that's expected to happen really early on. And over time everything stabilizes out, things get flung around and clean up happens a bit like the

solar system. You know, we were talking early on about the early stages of planet formation. Everything gets flung around and by the time you get to now, four and a half billion years down the road, it's fairly quiet. There's a bit going on, but most of the drama's finished. So the expectation is you'd see white dwarfs that are very young occasionally eating things because things get flung in and they get a

bit of a snack. And the material from that snack will be spattered over the surface of the white dwarf and be visible in its spectrum as anomalous added solid material, heavy elements. But that signal would only last a short time because the outer layer of the white dwarf is kind of a hydrogen soup and heavier elements would sink down. So any given time you'd eat something. The evidence for that meal would only remain for a few tens of thousands of

years, SOPs before it goes away. Okay, so the fact is we've seen some white dwarfs which have these anomalous heavy element readings in their atmospheres. We can tell they're eating stuff, but typically they're young. So you'd expect that. The quirky thing here is that this white dwarf, which goes by the name of lspm, which I think is a survey name, m followed by J020733331. So that's a coordinate on the sky. So that's telling you where in the sky this is. It's

catalog number. Yeah, this thing is an old white dwarf. It's thought to be about 3 billion years old. So in other words, the star that formed it died 3 billion years ago and it's been sitting there minding its own business. That's old enough that you'd expect everything to have calmed

down around it. But what the new observations have shown is evidence of 13 different heavy elements, including carbon, chromium, strontium, titanium, a lot of these different elements, roughly in the kind of abundance as you'd see on the Earth, added, to this white dwarf's atmosphere. So it's obviously just had a meal and we know it's a case of just had a meal rather than it's been a leftover from a long time ago, because this stuff will sink and disappear over the next

few tens of thousands of years. So what that means is that this white dwarf has just had a snack. Now it might have had that snack 30,000 years ago, or it may still be in the process of eating as we speak. Now what the team have been able to do is look at the amount of material you'd need to give the strength of signal you've got in the spectrum of the star. And, what they've calculated is that to get this amount of material you'd need to eat an asteroid about 200 kilometers in diameter.

So that's comparable to some of the larger asteroids in the asteroid belt, but not the largest by any means. It's within the bounds of possibility of what we see here at home. But the real question is why is it eating it now? Why is this happening now when you'd expect the system to have had plenty of time

to calm down? What it suggests to me, and it suggests in the paper, it suggests in the articles about this as well, is that the only way you can get something eating this late, after 3 billion years have passed, is if you've still got a number of planet mass objects in the system serving things up, which is what we've got in the solar system. If we look at the inner solar system, fragments of comets and asteroids are falling onto the sun all the

time. We've got near Earth asteroids, short period comets and long period comets whizzing around. And, they're being bounced around by the planets. Jupiter's throwing a lot of stuff away. Their orbits are constantly getting tweaked. And so therefore the sun is still getting this rain of solid material falling on it as a result of the planets

stirring things up. Even though the solar system mostly quietened down, the planets are still injecting material to the inner solar system, which is why we're getting meteorites and it's why the sun occasionally gets to numb some stuff. The idea here is that this star reached the end of its life. Puff dots with its outer layers. You have this really chaotic period where everything

had got stirred up, then it settled down. But because you still got planet mass objects there, they're still bouncing around what debris is left. And we're just catching this white dwarf just at the right time, when another asteroid has been flung inwards close enough to be torn apart by the star's gravity

and to give it a snack. So in other words, seeing this snack happening this late in the life of this white dwarf is fairly strong evidence that planets survived the death of its star, have lived there for 3 billion years, which a is really cool in of itself. But it also means that here is a star that we should look at when the Gaia data release comes next year. Gaia Dr. AH4, which will have been measuring this star's

position on the sky. And if there Are planets there, we'll be able to detect the wobble and confirm them. So it's also holding up a flag to exoplanet people saying, hey, folks, here's a target for you to look at when the data release comes out where you might be able to find some planets, because we think there's a smoking gun here that the planets are feeding the white dwarf, giving it little snacks every now and again.

their life are in equilibrium. The radiation coming out from the nuclear fusion in the middle balances gravity pulling in. The more massive you are, the hotter and denser you get in the middle, so the more energy you give off. And the result of that is that it roughly, it varies a little bit by star's mass, but roughly the brightness of a star, the luminosity of a star is proportional to the mass of the star to the power

4.3.54. Which means if you double the mass of a star, it'll get between 10 and 16 times brighter. So twice the mass, Call it a factor of 10 just to keep it easy. If it's 10 times brighter, that means it's burning its fuel 10 times quicker to produce 10 times as much energy. But it's only twice the mass, so it's only got twice as much fuel, so its life will be a factor of five times shorter. And the more massive you get, the shorter the life gets. Now, stars of different masses

have different. A star like Proxima Centauri will never swell up to become a red giant. It'll just be a dull, glowing ember and eventually go out. But even the oldest stars like Proxima Centauri are still really in their youth because they're burning their fuel so slowly. Stars that are more massive eventually get stars like the sun, which are what form like dwarfs. And, they eventually swell up to become a red giant,

puff off their outer layers. And for a star of the Sun's mass, that process from forming to the end of its life is thought to be about 12 billion years. It used to be 10 billion models seem to have refined. So people nowadays seem to say it's about 12 billion years. So a star of the mass of the sun that formed when our, Milky Way was very young will have lived and died and become a white dwarf more than a

billion years ago. But stars more massive than the sun can form white dwarfs as well, up to maybe two or even three times the mass of the sun, depending how effective it is at shedding mass at the end. Yeah, the maximum mass for white dwarf, you can get about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. If stars lose half their mass, that gives you something about three times the mass of the sun before you start it. Three times the mass of the sun. Three to the power four is three times three

times three times three. That's 81 if my mental arithmetic is correct. So three times the mass of the sun burns its fuel 81 times as quickly, which means it would live a 27th as long. Which means instead of 12 billion years, you get down to, 1.2 billion years, you get down to or like, 600 million years, 500 million years. So there will have been a lot of stars that were more m massive than the sun that have lived and died and created white dwarfs. And so there's going to be a

lot of white dwarfs out there. I saw someone talking a while back about how old the oldest white dwarf will be in how dim it will be, because white dwarfs just cool and gradually go from being blue to white to yellow to red. You know, gradually dim down. Yeah. but what that all means is that there are probably a really large population of

white dwarfs out there. We know quite a large number, but we won't know anywhere near as many of them as we do stars that are actually the mass of the sun, that are in the prime of their life because they're much fainter and harder to spot because they've got a much smaller surface area. So even though they're hot, they're tiny and, therefore they're faint. and the best example of that, of course, is a white dwarf that is a companion to Sirius. Sirius is the

brightest star in the night sky. It's more massive than the Sun. It's also nearby. Its white dwarf companion is something like a factor of a million times fainter than Sirius is. So even though the white dwarf is comparable in Master Sirius A, it is like a million times dimmer because it's so tiny. And that's why they're Hard to find.

bit more than 200km across. It was one of, if not the first object to get both a classification as an asteroid and as a comet. So it was initially discovered as a tiny speck of light moving around. It's discovered by Cowell I think in 1970, moving on an orbit that spends nearly all its time between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. At the minute. Long term it's an unstable

orbit. There's about a, ah, one in three chance that this will eventually end up in the inner solar system at some point in the next few million years. And that's part of the work I did during my PhD was running simulations of where this thing's going to go. That in itself is interesting because it's about a bit more than 200km across. So if this thing got trapped in the inner solar system, it will be, be a comet like

nothing we've seen in recorded history. Hale Bopp, which was ridiculous, had a 50 kilometer nucleus. If this thing's 250 kilometers across, that's five times the radius, which means it's something like 25 times the surface area, which means it will be a lot more impressive. So it's obviously an interesting object. Back in 2011, team of scientists traveled across the world to gather to watch Chiron block out the light from a

background star. So as this thing's moving through space, it just happened to pass in front of a star, from a subset of locations across the Earth. Now the distant stars are effectively so far away, we can consider the light coming in perfectly parallel. And so a 200 kilometer centaur will cast a shadow on the earth that's 200 kilometers across. And that shadow will whip across our planet. As the object and the Earth move around the sun, the shadow

moves, the Earth moves through it. And so you get a 200 kilometer roughly scale band on the Earth where that star will disappear, then reappear. We know how fast everything's moving. So if you can get in that location, have a lot of telescopes spread out in a line, you can observe that occultation event and, by how long the star vanishes from different locations, you can actually figure out the shape and the size of the centaur because you can essentially map

that shadow. And if you're near the edge, the star will disappear and reappear really quickly. If you're near the middle, you'll get a longer period where it vanishes. So these kind of, ah, occultation observations are really valuable to scientists. What happened in 2011 was they set their telescopes up and started watching a bit early to make sure they were looking at the star. And they noticed the star flickered on and off a couple of times before it properly

disappeared for the main occultation. Then after it reappeared, it flickered on and off again a couple of times. And that's really weird. Now there was a kind of precedent for this with observations that were made in 1977, I believe, of Uranus, which was being observed from, I think it was the Kuiper Airborne Observatory doing one of these occultations. And they'd observed Uranus for this occultation because they wanted to understand the atmosphere of

Uranus. And they figured as a stalwart behind Uranus, you'd see it not just disappear, but actually fade out as the light passed through the atmosphere. So you could measure the atmosphere and with that occultation of Uranus, occultation by Uranus, sorry, they got this flickering on and off thing. And that was the discovery of Uranus, of ring system. So basically the star vanished behind the rings, then reappeared, then vanished again, then reappeared, then went behind the

planet. Right. So with this 2011 event, the same kind of thing applied. It was the discovery of a ring system around this icy object. So this is a tiny thing, smaller than even Mimas, that we talked about last week with the subsurface ocean, something so small that its gravity is probably not strong enough to make it spherical. It's probably peanut shaped or rugby ball shaped or something like this.

It's probably not spherical. Around this object, it seems that there is a system of rings where there are three or four narrow rings at various distances. I think the distances are something like 273, 325, 438 and 1400 kilometers from the

center of Chiron. Got this ring system and it's been observed again since they did observations in 2018, 2022 and 2023, where they again figured out that the shadow of Chiron was going to scan across the planet, got a load of telescopes, went on a road trip and observed it happen to get more information about the rings. Because having a ring system around an object that isn't a planet is really cool.

still quite cool. What the new observations have shown though, is that, the ring system now seems to be different to how it was in 2011. In other words, the ring system is evolving before our very eyes and it actually seems to be a denser, stronger ring system now than it was 10 or 15 years ago. So it's possible that we're actually witnessing this ring system as it is forming or as it's changing over time.

Now I know Chiron has been quite active, it's been outgassing because it's been closer to the sun, hence the cometary type classification it got. Maybe some of the material it's ejecting in that outgassing is being ejected gently enough that it doesn't escape from Chiron and, that's repopulating the rings. We just don't know. But the only way we'll find out is by doing more of these observations.

But I think it's just really exciting and it's a really good reminder again that we always kind of imagine the solar system as a very sad and boring, placid place where not much changing anymore because it's four and a half billion years old. And as you get older, you Get a bit more sedentary and not much happens. But in fact it's a reminder that the solar system's a really dynamic place and things are constantly influenced, constantly

changing. We talked about it last week. The ocean on Mimas that is possibly only 15 million years old. Now, 50 million years sounds like a really long time, but in a system that's four and a half thousand million years old, that's like something that has happened to me in the last couple of weeks. That's a new feature, not something I've had since birth. And this is yet another example of the fact that the solar system just seems to be continually rapidly changing and evolving.

And it's one of this population called the Centaurs that are, the future parents of the next generation of short period comets. Effectively in the same way that the near Earth asteroids have their origin in the asteroid belt, short period comets have their origin in the Transeptunian region. But to get here from there, they've got to pass through the outer solar system. And that's what the Centaurs are.

Our final story, Jonti, is, an exoplanet that the popular press are going to say has got, some kind of life on it. it's a, it's a maybe life candidate, story, this one. And Yeah, but they're still using the term super Earth.

What it actually means is that if you took the Earth, as it is today and put it where that planet is, the Earth would still maintain its liquid water because planets are really diverse. If you took Venus and put Venus where the Earth is, With Venus's current atmosphere, Venus will be too hot to have liquid water. But if you observe the solar system from a long long way away and you discovered Venus on the Earth's orbit, it wouldn't look any different to the

Earth. it's a planet about the size of the Earth, sat in the habitable sun. We, it's habitable. Hooray. Whereas Venus is actually so hot that on the surface it had melt lead. And I certainly wouldn't want to visit there. It's even hotter than my room was the other night when the power cut had happened. And that was bad enough and brutal enough. so what this means is that ah, people have become very fond of find a planet around a star, you can work out where the boundaries of the habitable zone

will be based on a few assumptions. And this is work going back about a decade of the definitions we use now. And you've got the conservative and the optimistic habitable zone, which are basically loosely based around the fact that if you're as close to the star that you get an amount of radiation coming in comparable to Venus, you'll be too hot. If you're about where Mars is, you'll be too cold, but in the middle you'll be just right m. and that's about it.

Now that definition doesn't really take any account of the mass of the planet or its atmosphere. What that means is that ah, when you find a planet that is a super Earth that Is four times the mass of the Earth. That is almost certainly nothing like our planet at all. You'll do a calculation and say it sits in the optimistic habitable zone. So there is a potential it could have liquid water on its surface. That's full of a whole heap

of assumptions. But to me it's a really long stretch from saying it could have life.

that's part of why people are excited. It's near enough that we'll learn a lot more about it in the future. However, planet orbiting a red dwarf star means that to be in the habitable zone, it's got to be close in. This thing goes around its star every 54 days, which means that it is closer to its star than Mercury is to the sun. And given the difference in the masses,

it's actually much closer in than that. That means it's up close and personal with a red dwarf star, which are notorious for being active and flary and noisy, Particularly when they're young. They're tempestuous teenagers in their early days with mega stellar flares

and stuff like this. So it seems to be fairly widely accepted that planets around red dwarf stars that are close enough to be warm enough to have liquid water will have a hard time holding onto their atmospheres, Particularly when the stars are young, because it'll be having all sorts of bonkers fun. And that's kind of borne out with the planets around Trappist 1, which for years have been people saying these are the most Earth like planets ever and we'll find

life on them and hooray. And then when they finally got to use the James Webb space telescope and look at those planets, none of them have an atmosphere. Now I don't know about you, but I kind of like to breathe.

It's a fairly important part of living. And a planet without an atmosphere is not going to have liquid water on the surface because if you take the atmosphere away, there's no pressure, the oceans boil and then are blown away by the red dwarfs, which makes that planet a desiccated husk, which not particularly habitable. The reason I Get energized and activated about this. It's a lovely discovery. It's a really interesting planet. We'll, learn a lot more about planets

elsewhere. If there is an atmosphere, it's around us now that's near enough to us that with James Webb, we'll be able to study it, learn more about the atmosphere. We'll learn a whole heap from it. But I get really energized about this because there's only so many times that people can hear a story that says we found the most Earth like planet ever before they think we found the Earth before they think we found life elsewhere. And that

then really devalues it. When we finally do find planets that are, ah, properly like the Earth, when we do find signs of life elsewhere, scientists will be getting really excited because we've finally done it. And everybody will be like, well, why bother? You've done this a million times before. The whole boy who cried wolf thing again, a big bugbear. And something that's really critically important these days is

trust in science and trust in scientists. We, we've got all the controversies about topics that, are much more controversial than we're talking about with astronomy, with vaccine denial, with climate change denial, with people refusing to evacuate in the path of a hurricane that's coming because they don't believe the scientists. Anything that makes people less trusting of scientists because they're overblowing stories is damaging now far more than it has been in

decades past. It's part of why I get so frustrated with Avi Loeb and Three Eye Atlas. It's why get frustrated with the media coverage of stories like this and the scientists pushing, I think, somewhat unethically an argument that this could be a habitable planet because it makes the rest of us look like fools. And it makes people, it gives them ammunition to say, well, scientists lie to us when they're not. They're saying that this meets the criteria for the Habitable Zone paper that was

published 10 years ago. But it weakens that trust in science, which is so important now more than it ever has done. And I said I wouldn't go on a run and I'm now waving the flag and banging the table and all the rest of it. But it's a frustration that's wider than this story. And this story is lovely. It's an awesome discovery. They found a planet going around a star. That's very cool. We'll learn a lot more about it. It's a

brilliant result. You don't need to tag every result like this and say that this planet could have life.

and they've got a film coming out. But there's this thing of, you'd never believe the tragic photos. And it's bizarre. And at a time when we need fidelity and trust in our news and trust in our science, we've got to be careful about how much hyperbole we put into stories. I think.