Astronomy Cast
#774: How Does Bad Science Happen?
Scientific expertise is under attack on all fronts with concerns coming from politicians and the public. While most of this is unwarranted and politically motivated, there can be germ of truth. Bad science does happen, but how? How is it that papers that very few believe still make it through peer review and to publication? Why do professors at prominent universities get quoted saying things that seem to be fiction? In this episode, we consider the case for letting potentially impossible things make it to publication.
Show Notes- What is “bad science”?
- Bias and the scientific method
- P-values and “p-hacking”
- Breakthroughs that challenged consensus
- Academic pressure and “publish or perish”
- Competition and bad behavior in academia
- Institutions, media, and incentives
- Filters for real breakthroughs
- Careers, communication, and risk
[Fraser Cain]
Astronomy Cast, episode 774. How does bad science happen? Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos.
We’re helping you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of Universe Today.
With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute, and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, Pamela, how are you doing?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
I am thinking right now that we need to say that this episode is not how we know what we know, but it’s how what we know gets confused by bad publications.
[Fraser Cain]
How we know what we know, how we know what we don’t know, how we don’t know what we don’t know, how we don’t know what we know.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
How noise gets added to the system, basically.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah, mistakes get made.
[Fraser Cain]
Scientific expertise is under attack on all fronts, with concerns coming from politicians and the public. While most of this is unwarranted and politically motivated, there could be a germ of truth. Bad science does happen, but how?
So, do you have an example in your mind of perhaps some bad science that you want to share?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So, lately the two big ones in my life have been all of the attempts by non-planetary scientists to publish about 3i Atlas. And there have been some fascinating cherry picking of supernova data that is attempting to get rid of dark energy until you realize they’re cherry picking the data and what they’re saying doesn’t actually make sense if you look at stellar evolution.
[Fraser Cain]
So, specifically, you’re talking about examples where people who do have scientific training are cherry picking results to tell a certain scientific narrative that is not necessarily shared by the scientific consensus and the scientific mainstream.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yes.
[Fraser Cain]
Right. And, like, this is a spectrum because, you know, there are even, you know, you could almost describe them as scandals that are happening, the reproducibility crisis that’s going on in biology, psychology, this concept of p-hacking that scientists will sometimes do.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
We have to back up on that one because said out loud, that’s deeply confusing. There is a value in statistics, it is the lowercase letter p equals value that is used to define how likely your output fits to a given situation. And it’s called the p-value.
Luckily, I never have to deal with it in my life, but there are statisticians and stats is largely black magic as far as I’m concerned because you’re dealing with what is the noise in your system, what is the noise in the universe, what is the distribution that should occur due to things like chaos theory, what is the distribution that should happen because of motion and thermal statistics, all of these different things layer up to affect what the population should look like for a given system because of just noise.
[Fraser Cain]
Right. Well, we’ll get into this a bit more as we talk about this. So I want to approach this from a couple of perspectives.
The first perspective is how good scientists can delude themselves. And, you know, really focusing on this idea of confirmation bias, that we are looking for evidence that matches our preexisting conclusion. Yeah.
So give me a sense as a scientist, how do you approach a problem or approach a scientific question without biasing yourself on what is the outcome that you’re hoping to accomplish?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
The best examples I’ve seen and what I try to do is you take the data and then you brainstorm every single possible thing that could fit that data and you work through and you’re like, if it is this, we expect to see all of these things. Do we see all of those things? No.
Well, what parts of them do we or don’t we see and what could explain that? All right. So let’s look at the next thing.
What of these things would we expect to see? What do we actually see? What could explain the difference?
A brilliant paper I once saw that also made me die laughing was trying to figure out data that had dimming in an object. And they said, eagle flies in front of telescope as one of the things that they had to figure out what would that do to the light curve.
[Fraser Cain]
What would that look like to the light curve?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And so you have to take into account all the different things that could be at play and what are all the different things that could explain what you see.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. And this idea of confirmation bias is pernicious. It is baked in to our brains.
And this is a thing that we are always going to be having to double check and double check. And the best amongst us will fall for this confirmation bias, that there is an outcome that you are expecting, an outcome that you think is most likely, most logical, and that then you are looking for the evidence that matches that outcome and you are ignoring the evidence that is less evidence for that outcome. You talk about this, you brainstorm this gigantic list, but even just how do you resist?
How do you notice when you are potentially going down this confirmation bias pathway?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
It’s really hard. And quite often, human beings simply aren’t as creative as the universe is, which is a really weird thing to say. But there’s different things that occur in science where I look at the results and I’m like, how did they ever figure that out?
Who came up with that explanation? It’s brilliant, but how did you get from here to here? And you have to be super creative.
And this is part of where you hear people saying that it’s young scientists who make the amazing breakthroughs because they’re still not as influenced in a way by having to cynically keep saying to people, no, no, that actually doesn’t work. No, no, no, that doesn’t work. And you reach a certain point in your life where your gut response to everything is going to be no.
[Fraser Cain]
Right, that won’t work.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Right. So it’s when you’re young and not as, I don’t know, embittered, something, that you’re willing to go there and take in all the different ideas. And sometimes your data doesn’t give you a choice.
The 1998 supernova results, there was two different research teams that both saw a trend in the typical luminosity of supernova as a function of their velocity. And this indicated that either something is screwy with supernovae as a function of when they went off in the universe or our universe is actually accelerating over time and how it expands. That was undeniable.
And since then, people have been going through trying to find every possible way to explain that supernovae were actually just intrinsically fainter in the past. And nothing works if you look at an unbiased sample of galaxies.
[Fraser Cain]
Right, yeah. So confirmation bias is, I think, the strongest one. Yes.
But there are a bunch of other biases. Recency bias is another one. You can go and look up cognitive biases, and I think there’s like 80?
I forget how many there are. There are a lot, easily in the 30s, of biases that can influence our thinking. And often you have to go through this process and say, okay, I learned about this, I don’t know, kind of car, and now I’m seeing this car everywhere.
Is it a conspiracy? Oh, no, that’s recency bias. Man, confirmation bias is that experience you have when you’re on autopilot and you’re expecting something to go one way and then it doesn’t go that way.
Like you take a jar out of the fridge, you take a drink, you’re expecting it to be cold coffee and it’s apple juice.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
And suddenly, the moment you realize that it’s apple juice is the moment that you’re drinking it, and you’re like, wait a minute.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
Okay, of course it’s apple juice. I’ve grabbed the apple juice container. But my brain was so certain that I was going to be grabbing the coffee that I drank the coffee, and then it’s that moment when reality informs you that you’ve made this mistake.
But that’s just, you know, those are a couple of examples. There are so many different biases that we can fall for that are constantly, and really the scientific method has been about let’s learn all of the different ways that the human brain can go wrong and try to account for those. And so what are the kinds of techniques that a scientist will use to try and hit the gold standard of good science?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Literally the best that I see in the literature are just where you’re like, okay, I’ve gone to a bunch of conferences, I’ve presented this research, I’ve listened to the question and answers, I’ve heard everyone saying, well, could it be this? Could it be this?
[Fraser Cain]
Right, yeah.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And here’s me going through and addressing every single one of them. Now, that’s the gold standard. The problem that you run into though is sometimes people, and this can occur at any point in your career, are so shaped by I wrote a proposal for my dissertation to do X, I got a grant funded to do X, and the data is actually consistent with three.
Not X. It’s not even a letter. It’s something over here somewhere.
And it’s really hard to get your brain, especially when you’re only talking to rooms full of people that are in your subdiscipline, it’s really hard to get your brain to open up all the way like that person whose paper said, this is what an eagle would do if it flew in front of our data. It was brilliant. Big bear observatory for the win.
You have to sometimes sit down and talk to people in other fields. You have to hopefully work somewhere that if your results don’t match what you proposed, it gets celebrated. You hopefully are working on a dissertation where you will still get it if you prove something very different from what you set out to prove.
And so being, this is going to sound so dumb, but being in a place where you are safe to talk to people outside of your discipline to get input and you’re allowed to have unexpected results are both necessary.
[Fraser Cain]
So we’ve talked about how the researcher can kind of fool themselves. How does, and you sort of touched on this a little bit, but how does the environment of the scientific community, the expectations and the demands of how science works, how can that potentially cause bad science?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
People end up working on the same idea year after year after year, trying to prove what I’m doing is right. You get into a rut. You get your old grants renewed.
You keep going down the same rabbit hole. And once you start down that path, you have to say I was wrong or this isn’t going where I was hoping it was going, which isn’t the same thing as I was wrong. It’s just the I am bored now.
This is just not what I was hoping for. And human beings really aren’t good at doing either of those things. And so we will see people that start on a project as a graduate student and it’s cool and they get attention and they get their PhD and they get their first job to continue working on that work.
And so they continue building on the same data set, getting a very similar data set. And they don’t make the necessary leap to broaden even their own horizons. And by siloing themselves and following the easy dopamine hit of incremental breakthroughs, they can end up doing things where they are working with deeply biased data sets.
We’re seeing this in cosmology right now. They can end up being influenced by if I come out and say it’s not alien spacecraft, my books are going to stop selling and I’m going to lose a major part of my income.
[Fraser Cain]
Right, right. We’re going to talk about that later on. But I guess for me, my question was more about the environment of the academic system.
So for example, Publish or Perish, right?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
That your worth as a scientist depends on you publishing on a regular basis. Yeah, it’s constant. It’s constant.
And you are either trying to fundraise or you are trying to write up the results of your work. Or both. And null results are not interesting, right?
People want results. And so if you go and do this enormous amount of work and you’re like, yeah, we didn’t find it, right? That is considered a waste of your time.
Even though null results are equally as important as positive results. And so it just shows you where to not look or constrains the boundaries or whatever, right? That it’s a mill, it’s a grind that scientists are in this position.
And instead of being able to take the time to really come up with a result that they’re very proud of, the pressure is hurry up and get out your results. Publish, publish, publish. And we are swimming in papers.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah. Half-baked papers.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah, yeah. Millions of papers. I think a million papers a year.
Paul Sutter wrote a book on this. And there’s just so many papers coming out. And he identified a whole bunch of these ideas that the environment is very much working in a direction that makes it very hard to be a really good scientist.
There’s a lot of changes they could make that would allow science to move more smoothly. All right. So the beginning of this episode has all been about how scientists can fool themselves and either end up in a dead end or even publish a result that is incorrect just through confirmation bias, through whatever.
How the system really encourages you to publish quickly, to cut corners, to get by on trying to do more with less. That there’s a lot of institutional and sort of larger architectural issues with the scientific community. But let’s talk about individuals.
What if you know how the scientific system works and you want to do bad science because it makes your life better? Either you have courses you want to sell, you have positions that you want to gain, you have books you want to sell, you have TV appearances you want to do, blogs, you want to gain tenure. There’s stuff that you can do.
How can you sort of work this system?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
One of the easiest ways is to have a friend group of prominent individuals that will both suppress the papers of your competition and support your papers. Befriending, it’s at the end of the day, an old boys network. And I mean that in every adjective I used.
Right, yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
So does this come like there are people who are on the journals who are reviewing these things, people who are doing the peer review?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So you send it to a journal that’s friendly. You suggest people to review your paper that you know will approve it. And you get the word out, hey, I heard this group is about to come out with this paper.
You’re going to want to turn it down. And you say this to all the people who might be reviewing it. And you get the word out.
And you give your list of reasons that it shouldn’t review well. And one of the most eye-opening moments I had in undergraduate was we had a prominent solar scientist at our institute. And he took two or three of the graduate students with him to a conference.
And we were all hanging out talking. And the grad students were like, it was wild this other prominent solar scientist put a slide down on it. This was the days of the overhead projectors.
That was literally a gravestone of prominent person at my institute. And then just spent their talk shredding. Wow.
Yeah, it gets that brutal. It gets that mean. You and I have been at conferences where we’ve seen one person give a presentation.
And then their competitor went around the room saying, no, no, no, no, that’s wrong to all the journalists. Yes. And it’s insane.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah, right. So this sort of like the politics and the sort of because the benefits are like if you are successful, if you discover something important, if you get meaningful papers published in distinguished journals, you get funding, you get tenure, you get all of these benefits. And so the tendency, the natural human tendencies to try to play to the humans factor of what you’re doing is really hard to resist for a lot of people.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And it goes as deep as it’s common for a while. I don’t know if it’s still true, but for a while there was this like chain between Michigan State University and the University of Texas where there is a bunch of people between both institutions. There was between Harvard and Stanford.
There’s just these various institutes where it’s fairly common for someone to do undergrad at one, grad at the other, grad at one, postdoc at the other. And people just flow back and forth. And you end up with entire networks of people that just like, oh, this team does good work.
I approve their paper. And at the same time, you know, this institute and this institute are both going up for funding for the same thing, are both competing for the same thing. Your buddies on this team, your students can get jobs on this team.
You’re going to support this team. And on this team’s paper, like the comment that caused me to throw things was, why did you not explain why we shouldn’t fund your competitor with this grant? Well, my competitor didn’t ask for funding to do this work.
I did. But it’s at that level of comments going back and forth.
[Fraser Cain]
Right, right. And the reality is just that what you have to gain is that you get to do your science. What you have to lose is that you don’t have a job.
Right. And so you’re going to, you know, unfortunately try to adapt what you’re saying, what you’re proposing, what you’re planning so that it will be more acceptable to the people who make those kinds of decisions. And, you know, I mean, I think we’ve got a current climate that’s happening in the U.S. where, you know, up until a certain point, there was real value in proposing topics that deal with people with, you know, diversity, people who come from less advantaged backgrounds. You know, think about things in psychology and economy. And now suddenly, boom, everything’s switched around. And so now, you know, if you were before trying to say why it’s important to educate disadvantaged youths, it just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Now that’s a very difficult sell. And the universities are on tenterhooks. And you need to be very, very careful about how you do that.
And that, like, how can that not affect the science?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And people are going to work even harder to protect their friends. And we work with the same people our entire life. There are people in this profession that have known me since I was in eighth grade, and that’s horrifying.
No one in their midlife wants anyone to remember what they were like when they were in middle school. And because it’s such a small community, there are so few jobs, the number of jobs are decreasing. People are just going to want to look much more favorably upon the work of the people, the institute, the research teams that they hope to see survive.
[Fraser Cain]
So one thing that I’ve noticed, and especially as a journalist, you know, people reach out to me directly to promote their work. And I will always respond to them, you know, I’m just a journalist. I’m not a scientist.
I have no way of knowing whether what you are doing is science or not. You know, I am unqualified to judge. So I need some kind of filter, such as archive or a journal article or a press release coming from NASA for me to know whether or not it is the actual breakthrough discovery that you are suggesting.
So we’ve seen, you know, we’ve seen a bunch of examples. There was like a superconductor, a room temperature superconductor. There was cold fusion back in the 80s.
There’s, you know, there’s claims, as you said, about supernova, claims about alien spacecraft moving through the solar system, that there’s a kind of a turn to the public. Going on the, you know, making the rounds on the podcasts. What is the kind of the end goal for that?
Because from my perspective as a journalist, that’s a one-way street that you don’t come back along. You know, if you’re going to go on the podcast and you’re going to say stuff that your scientific colleagues will go, well, that’s just nonsense. Will you ever be able to exist in this, in the realm of academia again?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
The trick that I’ve seen is you get tenure. Once you have tenure, it’s almost impossible to fire you. You can say anything you want.
Yeah. Then you start the press releases that will get you the speaking gigs that pay large amounts of money. Then you get the agent who will sell your books.
Then you go on the podcast circuit to sell your books. Then you launch the substack, the ghost, the beehive, whatever. Don’t use substack.
It has Nazis. All of these things generate revenue and clicks. It turns out that nowadays, universities and institutes want their researchers to accomplish four different things basically.
One, do not get them in trouble. Now, certain institutes, bad press is still good press. Just don’t touch anyone inappropriately.
Then they want you to be a source of revenue.
[Fraser Cain]
Raise money.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
That can take the form of grants or donations. Saying wild stuff can often attract donations.
[Fraser Cain]
From the people who this meets their political objectives.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yes.
[Fraser Cain]
We don’t see it so much in astronomy, but in other fields for sure that there are climate things you can say. There are political things, sociological things, biological things you can say, science you can do that will bring in the donations.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Then in addition to that, they want to raise attention for the institute. This can be name recognition. This can be news articles.
I make so many universities sad because I cite the name of the researchers and the name of the publication. Because the publication goes with the researcher forever, the researcher doesn’t go with the institute forever. Words are short and time is short.
Quite often, institutes don’t count news coverage that doesn’t cite the institute by name.
[Fraser Cain]
I purposefully cite the institution by name. I do that to literally make the press officer happier. I do this on purpose. I want to be able to dig through their Rolodex and come back again and again and again. And so for me, the press officer is my point of contact that I’m trying to impress. And so I’m trying to get, I want them to come to me with stories and scoops and interesting research that’s happening in their institution.
And then I will also reach out directly to the researcher and then I will want to connect back up so that the press officer is like, oh, I didn’t know that we were doing that, you know, that you were on this podcast. That’s great news. Oh, and hi, Fraser.
Nice to meet you. Yeah. So that’s, you know, I’m working that system.
I have a totally different, I have totally different incentives than you do.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And my point of perspective is I want to call attention to the new ideas and get the paper into the hands of whoever’s reading that wants to get more information. So, so-and-so did such and such, you can find the paper in, is the phrase that I would normally, and I’m saying it. And like I said, I’m going to mispronounce all of it anyways.
[Fraser Cain]
So- There was a fourth thing that universities want?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So the fourth thing that universities want is they want opportunities for students. So if you publish enough papers and you put your students as first author, that totally makes the institute happy. So what we’re currently seeing is institutes often having students as first author on some of these slightly squirrely papers, at least on round one of squirrely paper.
Like I said, these people, once they started in grad school, will often continue down the same route for their career. And so once you have the student doing the work, it’s getting lots of clicks, you’re bringing in money, and you haven’t actually done anything that causes the university to get the kinds of bad press that they have to put out statements about, they’re good.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And so, I mean, you can enrich yourself personally, you can get the book sales, you can get the television appearances, you can get your own television show, and so on and so forth. Being able to walk back to academia, like I said, from my perspective as a journalist, watching this process happen, I have not seen it work. I’ve seen people who have done what I consider to be the honorable step to say, I’m going to detach myself from the academic system so that I can become a science communicator.
I think about Phil Plait, I think about Ethan Siegel, I think about even Paul Sutter, right? That they have the academics, they have the credentials, but they understand that they can’t both be a communicator to the public and a person who is attempting to also fundraise and so on. And then you can see the people who are clearly doing everything they can to maintain a level of balance while keeping a foot in both realms.
And I’m not even going to name names here. And then you can see people who I feel have… They’ve gone to the dark side.
They’ve gone to the dark side. There is no path back that when they come back to academia, academia is going to go, oh, I don’t think we have room for you here anymore. Yeah.
And that’s a really tricky thing because I think it’s heartbreaking for the people who, you know, they wanted to be scientists, but the siren song of publicity and revenue pulls them in other directions.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And what I think has been very interesting is watching people who essentially grew up in the age of blogging and Twitter. Dr. Katie Mack, I think, is someone who’s managing to do excellent science communications and excellent science. And I will name that name.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. And I think David Kipping is another example of someone who I think is doing a good job of that. But they are, I think, rare.
And I think are at great risk if they make a misstep of getting high on their own supply. And, you know, for them, I would be very, very careful because there’s a, you know, it’s the, you know, what is it? Hate leads to anger.
Anger leads to whatever. You end up in the dark side, right? And then there’s those who’ve gone all the way.
So. And now we’ve reached the end of our episode. So there you go.
It’s true. Thanks, Pamela.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Thank you, Fraser. And thank you so much to all of our $10 a month and higher patrons. You allow us to do everything we do.
This show is made possible by our community on patreon.com slash astronomycast. This week, we’d like to thank the following $10 and up patrons. Abraham Cottrell, Alex Rain, Andrew Stevenson, Arno DeGroot, Bart Flaherty, Benjamin Mueller, Bresnik, Bruce Amazine, Claudia Mastriani, Dale Alexander, David Bogarty, Diane Philippon, Dr. Jeff Collins, Iran Zegev, Felix Gut, Frodo Tanimba, Glenn Phelps, Greg Davis, Hannah Tackery, Janelle, Jeanette Wink, Jim Schooler, Joe Holstein, John Thays, Justin Proctor, Katie and Ulyssa, Christian Golding, Laura Kettleson, Lana Spencer, Mark Schneidler, Matthew Horstman, Michael Purcell, Mike Dog, Nate Detweiler, Papa Hot Dog, Paul L.
Hayden, Philip Walker, Robbie the Dog with the Dot, Ruben McCarthy, Sandra Stanz, Scott Briggs, Zege Kemmler, Stephen Miller, The Brain, Tim Girish, Tushar Nakini, Will Feld, and Zero Chill. Thank you all so very much.
[Fraser Cain]
All right. Thanks, Pamela. And we will see you all next week.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Bye-bye, everyone.
Live Show#773: What Would You Do With $1 Billion For Astronomy?
We are powerless fans of space exploration. But what if some fool gave us the authority and funding to make our space dreams a reality? Someone asked us what we’d do with a billion dollars. What missions? Which telescopes? But what if we had more? 100 Billion! A trillion! All the monies! You keep asking, and this week we answer you! Come hear what Fraser and Pamela would do if they were given complete control over $1billion that had to be used for astronomy.
Show Notes- What if we had $100B or even $1 trillion to explore the cosmos?
- Ground-based observatories: big science at surprisingly low cost
- Pamela’s dream: VLT North or Vera Rubin North in the Canary Islands
- Funding the Breakthrough Starshot interstellar mission
- Fixing the grant system: fully funding 50–100 researchers for a decade
- A $100M lunar interferometer mission to study stellar surfaces
- Affordable rover missions and rideshares to the Moon and Mars
- Solar sails: low-cost missions for asteroids and deep space exploration
- The value of small missions as testbeds for future breakthroughs
- Investing in next-generation planet hunters: “super PLATO / mini Kepler”
- Follow-up to Gaia using infrared to map hidden stars and brown dwarfs
- Ultimate wish list:
- Radio telescope on Moon’s far side
- New orbital Great Observatories
- Successor to Chandra for high-energy universe
- Nulling interferometers to find Earth-like worlds
- Solar gravitational lens telescope for megapixel exoplanet imaging
- Importance of Mars Sample Return for life detection
- Fleets of robotic telescopes for public education and research
Fraser Cain:
Astronomy Cast, Episode 773 What Would We Do With a Billion Dollars? Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly, facts-based journey through the Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today.
With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the Director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pamela, so this is me talking from the past to us, because at the time that now everyone is listening to this, I am still traveling and we have no idea how I’m doing.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
You have gone to the land of UTC plus seven?
Fraser Cain:
Yes, I am in the future.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Leaving me behind?
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I’m working on my tan, I am walking in the jungle. Who knows what’s happening?
I hope it went well. And you? Who knows how you’re doing?
So there’s no point asking how we’re doing, because we would just be projecting into the future to try and imagine. So we’ll move on. We are powerless fans of space exploration, but what if some fool gave us the authority and funding to make our space dreams a reality?
Someone asked us what we do with a billion dollars. What missions? Which telescopes?
But what if we had more? A hundred billion, a trillion, all the monies. Okay, so it’s funny, when you had originally pitched this episode, I, in my mind, was ten billion dollars.
I thought you’d said ten million dollars. I’m like, okay, yeah, ten million, you know, that’s something to sink my teeth into. And you’re like, okay, so remember, it’s like one billion dollars.
I’m like, what? Yeah, yeah. That’s not any money.
Right. I can’t, I could barely eat lunch on a billion dollars. So fine.
So let’s kind of give people a sense of what you can buy for a billion dollars. What are some missions that would cost roughly a billion dollars?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So I don’t know about missions, but the one that made me happy was the VLT is about nine hundred million to build. And I would love to replicate the VLT, the Very Large Telescope, in the Northern Hemisphere, have another one of these four massive mirrors with satellite mirrors that can do interferometry, that have all these amazing different instruments on board. And let’s just be prepared to do equal science at the highest resolutions possible.
Fraser Cain:
So the construction of Vera Rubin was about five hundred and seventy million. So you could buy a North, a Vera Rubin North for that budget. The Extremely Large Telescope was a little over a billion euros.
So I don’t know what that is in U.S. dollars, maybe 1.3. So kind of in that. So you can build a second Extremely Large Telescope. So ground-based observatories are surprisingly affordable.
And it’s not surprising to me that that your instinct was to go after a ground-based observatory because I had the exact same instinct, which is that like Vera Rubin North, please, right? Or Extremely Large Telescope North. And this was in the works, right?
The 30 meter telescope was going to be built in Hawaii as a counter to the Southern Hemisphere’s telescope. And so the future of that is uncertain. Maybe it’ll end up in the Canary Islands.
So I would probably build either the Extremely Large Telescope North or the Vera Rubin North and put them on the Canary Islands.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And so that hopefully we can figure out how to do some savings. And I was like, so what could we do with like 100 million left over?
Fraser Cain:
We could fully fund Breakthrough Starshot. That’s the amount of money that they were intending to spend on Breakthrough Starshot. Yeah, it was $100 million.
That’s how much Yuri Milner had set aside. And then in the end, they only actually gave a handful of million. And so never actually funded Breakthrough Starshot.
But that was the plan. Now, that wouldn’t get you to another star system, but it would allow a lot of people to do interesting work for a decade on interstellar spacecraft.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Speaking of people doing interesting work, one of the things I looked up is, again, we are not going to consider like endowments or anything like that. We are earmarking money to go to specific things. And so…
Fraser Cain:
So not just general outreach, development of quantum, quantum, quantumness.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Well, one thing I considered is right now, researchers have, for every grant we get, in general, you are limited to two months of salary per grant, which means for someone like me, you need at least, if you’re super lucky, six grants to be full-time employed. Most of the time, you have to have even more than that, because you get two weeks here, you get two months there, and it works out to… You’re never really full-time employed is what it actually works out to.
But the dream for all of us is to be able to just focus on thinking, experimenting, doing research, and not having to spend all this time just constantly asking for money that you’re probably never going to get. So you could, for $100 million, fund 50 to 100 people, depending on what stage in their career they’re at, for 10 years. And by just saying, okay, we’re going to take a bunch of people at different stages in their career, doing completely different types of science, and we’re just going to say, go.
We are funding you.
Fraser Cain:
So you gave a really wonderful and elaborate explanation of what you would do if you were going to break the rules of how we would set up this.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I said we’re not going to endow. So I’m saying we’re giving them 10 years- That sounds like an endowment. Endowment lasts forever and requires you to only spend 3% to 5% of the amount of money to do the process.
Fraser Cain:
A 10-year endowment, okay. So what about space? Because it gets really hard to spend money in space.
So I’ll give you sort of the example that I want, which is that I would like an interferometer on the moon. And so when you look at the budget of, say, the Blue Ghost Lander, these NASA lunar COTS missions are in the $70 million-ish range. So for $100 million, I think you could do this mission that I did an interview about this, that you would land on the moon with an optical telescope, and then there would be a rover that would be attached to the telescope.
It would drive out about 100 meters away from the telescope, and then it would have a telescope on board. And it would point up in the sky, and then you would be able to resolve features on the surfaces of stars, because the interferometer allows you to see bright objects, but with a very large baseline. And so we could resolve the surface of Betelgeuse.
We could resolve the surface features of other stars. We could separate binary stars into their separate pieces. So I think that’s $100 million.
And so then that got me thinking, like, okay, so if you could have lunar landers that would do really interesting things, things that would really push things forward, at $100 million a pop, you could do a lot of really interesting missions, you know?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So to give some perspective, the Viper rover, which is extraordinarily complex, was developed across two different programs, actually, and over a decade. It’s estimated that its total cost will come in around $500 to $800 million, depending on what all you include in the costing. And that’s as complicated as it gets.
So yeah, we should totally be able to do, like… Do you remember the little, tiny first rover that they put on Mars that found the blueberries?
Fraser Cain:
I’m trying to remember what it was called. Well, the blueberries were found by Spirit and Opportunity. I think it was Spirit.
I thought they were found…
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Are you thinking… The ones that had the yoga bear?
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, you’re thinking of the little rover that was attached to the Mars Pathfinder.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Oh, yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, I think the rover was actually called Pathfinder.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
No? No, it was…
Fraser Cain:
No, the mission was Pathfinder.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Sojourner.
Fraser Cain:
Sojourner, that’s it.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
And its job was just to test, can you drive around on Mars? It didn’t find anything but rocks.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah, so Pathfinder and Sojourner, Pathfinder with Sojourner. That size Tonka truck version, RC robot version of a rover, that’s nowadays something that we can consider doing. And the chipsets are so powerful and so small.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, so there was a 10 kilogram rover on the Japanese Hakuto-R mission. And that’s the kind of scale that we’re talking about. And so it was designed to land on the moon and then and roam around under solar power and explore.
And so we could put… You could do a fancier version, maybe you’re at 120 million, 150 million for your lander on the moon, and you’ve got rovers and telescopes and all kinds of stuff.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And there’s other things that you can start doing, like ride shares of tiny things. One of the things we’d love to be able to do is really understand the weather across the surface of Mars. And there’s this absolutely giggle worthy program being worked on in the Netherlands called Tumbleweed Rover.
It’s just this giant ball of infrastructure with sails and it rolls all over the place. And according to wind tunnel tests, Martian gravity and wind, they should be able to go up like 30 degree inclines with this thing.
Fraser Cain:
That’d be cool.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And so you can start imagining you can ride share tumbling rovers to Mars. You can use the lawn dart approach that was explored for Venus by the Russians about a decade ago, except start looking at Mars because there’s things to ride share with to Mars. And as you go over, you just deploy all these literally lawn dart type things with little tiny antennas.
So they keep their orientation thanks to center of mass, hit the ground, dive into the ground, leave the antenna sticking out and just monitor the weather.
Fraser Cain:
So this idea of ride shares, I 100% agree with you. So one mission that I was really excited about was the NEA Scout, the Near Earth Asteroid Scout mission. And this was going to be a solar sail, was on the Artemis 1 mission.
It was in the ring, the docking ring between the upper and lower stages. And unfortunately, because that rocket didn’t launch, a lot of the batteries died on the missions that were inside of it. But the idea was great.
It was $25 million to build a solar sail mission that would have gone to an asteroid. Like people say, oh, like NASA wastes money. That was amazing for the budget.
And so imagine, like for me, the theme is really about that there are a bunch of really exciting and interesting technologies. Solar sails are probably at the very top of the list that we just do not have enough practice with. And so I would want to see a real emphasis on solar sail type missions because then they’ll have an application across many different spacecraft.
You could just put a solar sail on the deep space gateway to keep its orientation. You could put a solar sail as just a backup on other missions that might’ve been able to save missions. All right.
I’m going to give you sort of another sort of direction that I would want to go with my billion dollars. And that is, you know, that NASA’s test mission was actually relatively inexpensive. And this is a planet hunting mission that’s found hundreds, we’ll probably find thousands of planets by the time it’s done.
It was, its budget was like 400 million. And then the upcoming European Space Agency’s PLATO mission, which is going to be a much fancier version with like 24 separate cameras. It’s in the 500 million euro range.
So 600-ish million dollars, so there’s some room to spare. And I would love to see a fancier version of PLATO because we lost Kepler before we could get that discovery of an Earth-sized world orbiting around a sun-like star. But is there a kind of a mid-range, super PLATO, mini Kepler that would get us that detection of the Earth-sized world orbiting around a sun-like star?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. You and I, I love the fact that we looked in completely different directions because like that’s the kind of thing where I’d love to see a return of small PI-led missions. And one of the awesome things that we get to see the plans for is the NIAC stuff where they’re testing all sorts of like absolutely wild ideas.
And we’re at a point where solar panels are so powerful now, or they generate so much power nowadays, where chipsets are so small and so capable nowadays, where CCDs and CMOS chips, depending on which technology you’re going with, are so sensitive. We can do things that we never even dreamed of. And there are technologies waiting to be tested and combined.
Like if I were allowed to find engineers and play to my heart’s delight, one of the things I haven’t seen, and maybe you have because you see a lot more of these than I do. I would love to see something that is brought up to speed using solar sails on the inner solar system and then has an ion drive that continues to accelerate them as they hit the higher speeds. So you can imagine you’re sending outer solar system tiny things out there, just big enough to be able to send back a good signal, come up to speed with the solar sail, drop the solar sail, send the ion drive into activity, keep accelerating, keep going, and just do the thing that Don did with a kickstart to get you going.
Fraser Cain:
Your recommendation about NASA NIAC, I am a gigantic fan of NIAC. I report on pretty much every single story that they, everything that they fund and their total budget. I mean, they give you just a couple of hundred thousand dollars per project for the phase one, more like 700,000 for phase two, maybe a million, a little bit over a million for phase three, that every year, NASA’s NIAC’s total budget is, I don’t know, $10 million?
Like almost nothing compared to the rest of the, of the NASA financing. And yet they are the ideas of the future that are being considered. I would, can you imagine if you just expanded and expanded it so that you were, they had a really great pipeline that you were essentially, so it’s this idea of, of removing the risk that you don’t want to take on a new technology if you think it’s going to add too much technical risk to your mission.
And so, um, we need a way to de-risk really great ideas in a practical way to demonstrate that they work in space and that then these missions can then be considered down the road and they won’t increase the budget. When you think about a lot of the risks that were included in James Webb, they ballooned its budget. If they knew ahead of time which technologies were safe to work in space, which ones would be easy to use and so on, probably would have brought their costs down.
So, so I would love to see some kind of fancy NIAC that does, does a sort of ideas of the future and de-risking great ideas to bring down or bring up their technological readiness level for future missions.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And one of the things that’s getting reflected in what both of us are suggesting is due to budget constraints, we’re seeing both NASA and the National Science Foundation quite often ask what major things need supported. So we see the National Science Foundation and I think it’s the Department of Energy funding Vera Rubin Observatory and a bunch of these big cameras. We see NASA funding James Webb Space Telescope and TESS and Europa Clipper and flagship projects that you can never imagine a small university doing, whereas ESCAPADE is one of the few smaller missions that has been funded.
It’s coming out of the University of California, Berkeley. It has blue and gold, two separate things that will be heading off to Mars. But there’s very few of these smaller missions still getting done because resources are scarce.
And if you can fund something huge like Rubin, it revolutionizes the entire field. These smaller projects are test beds. They’re ideas that their children will revolutionize the entire field.
They’re just saying, hey, this is possible.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
We’re currently killing the future by not investing in it. I’d like to have a future, please.
Fraser Cain:
Yes. Yeah. All right.
So another of my favorite missions is the Gaia mission. Oh, my favorite.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
And it came in at about 600 million, so a little less than a billion dollars. And we learned so much about the Milky Way, about the cosmos from Gaia. And there’s another mission on the books that people are proposing, essentially a follow on to Gaia.
It would be an infrared version of Gaia. And so it would have that same level of astrometry to to measure the positions of all of the stars. But it would be looking more into the infrared.
So we’d be looking for the cooler objects, the red dwarfs, the brown dwarfs, maybe large exoplanets and looking for the motion of them. Because we still don’t have a great census of where all of the red dwarfs, brown dwarfs are, even though they’re the most common stars in the universe. So we’re still learning about that.
And so, you know, for my billion dollars, I could buy Gaia, too.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And Gaia, it is my favorite space mission so far. What they did with its technology. Go find a video, humans.
It had a light train like nothing else that has ever existed. And I can only hope we learn from that technology and build more things, building on what was learned.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s always makes me so sad when engineers come up with this absolutely brilliant idea.
With Gaia, the spacecraft had this CCD array and it had a telescope and it would slowly turn at the rate that it was depositing light onto the pixels on its camera system. And reading out those pixels. And then reading all those pixels.
Yeah. And it was perfectly tuned to make these measurements. It was a it’s a beautiful telescope.
And it’s so sad that it’s no longer operating.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. And we could use something similar to that that also just worked brighter. One of the really stupid things in astronomy is we don’t actually know where Betelgeuse is.
It is, depending on the paper, between 410 light years and 640 light years. And we can measure the sucker’s angular size on the sky. And if we just knew where it was, we could like, there’s so much amazing physics we could do.
But it was too bright for Gaia. All right.
Fraser Cain:
So I think, you know, you get a sense, I think, from both of us that that there are these that there’s these scrappy ideas that are, you know, that there could be more funding to them, new forms of propulsion system, new ideas and so on. So let’s go the other way now. Let’s let’s if we had all the monies in the world, what would what would you want to see out there?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
If we had all the monies in the world, we definitely need a radio telescope on the far side of the moon. That that is a must, please.
Fraser Cain:
And, you know, a radio telescope on the far side of the moon gives us the ability to detect the hydrogen line from the dark ages of the universe. We essentially are able to scan this time when those first stars were forming and get that get a real sense of how the universe came together, which right now, you know, is outside the reach of James Webb.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And it would be amazing if we could just start doing things like, can we please have an on orbit eight meter optical? Can we please have a bigger, more sensitive.
Fraser Cain:
Like LUVAR, we want 15, we want 20.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
OK, fine. But there was the great observatories that were built in the 80s and 90s. And Chandra’s still hanging out there doing its best.
And someday Chandra is going to stop. I want I want to have something on deck that is even better, more powerful, that takes us out into the high energy universe. I want a successor to Fermi out there ready to go.
I want to have the survey scope that has all the abilities that Swift has that it’s leveraging for gamma ray bursts to instead just be like, and now we are going to simultaneously observe this in optical infrared, gamma and X-ray, because why not?
Fraser Cain:
Yep. Yeah, so if money was like for me, if money was no object, I mean, the thing you mentioned, the 80 meter telescope, like we want to know whether there are Earth-sized worlds orbiting around Sun-like stars within the habitable zone.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
We need that.
Fraser Cain:
We want to find Earth 2.0. And you need a coronagraph, you need a whopping big telescope with a whopping big coronagraph or multiple spacecraft flying in formation to perform a nulling interferometer. So, you know, originally it was the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which I think we mourn once a year. Yeah, at least.
You know, we put flowers on its grave and feel sad about it. And the successor to that is the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets, which is being developed by the European Space Agency. It’s going to be expensive.
You know, maybe not web expensive, but in that kind of range. My other one is Mars Sample Return Mission, because Perseverance collected all of these samples that very likely the answer to, is there life on Mars, is in one of those samples waiting on the surface of Mars. We just have to bring them home.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And at a certain point, we have to improve education. And there’s this amazing opportunity coming with the Rumen Observatory. It’s going to be spotting so many transient objects, things that flicker, flare and move in the night, that they have four different data repositories to handle the output.
And this is where you start being like, OK, we are just going to build fleets of robotic telescopes. And there are here in the United States, 125,000 libraries between town libraries, university libraries and school libraries. And so 300 million people, 125,000 libraries, that’s basically one library per 3,000 people on the planet.
So let’s start assigning each of those libraries a telescope that school kids can use for science fair projects, that people with spare time can use to follow up objects and just increase public engagement in science in a way that is shared resources and scalable in a reasonable way.
Fraser Cain:
I feel like you’re not really spending all the monies. That’s not very much monies.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And that’s the thing, we’re not even spending that much money right now.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, yeah. So the one that is like the most ridiculous, probably in the hundred billion dollar range or more, would be the solar gravitational lens telescope.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah, this is Fraser’s thing that he brings up every year. And I just find it so remarkably ridiculous. Go ahead, explain this ridiculousness.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, well, it just is that you send the spacecraft out to 500 AU from the sun, where the gravity of the sun forms a natural gravitational lens, gives you a telescope, the natural multiplier to your telescope. Yeah. And so you would be able to see a megapixel image of an Earth-sized world orbiting around a sun-like star, like literally see the mountains, forests, oceans, clouds, etc.
With a relatively modest telescope, you just have to get out there. And so.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. And you have to get out there and stop.
Fraser Cain:
No, you don’t have to stop.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Well, you need to enter orbit.
Fraser Cain:
No, no, you’re going to keep moving. You just keep moving. As long as you stay in the cone, you can, as long as you head down the cone that’s created, lining up the planet with the star, you could be at 10,000 AU and it’s still fine.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Right. But the signal attenuation is a bit much.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, this is like the engineering challenges of getting a signal. But I mean, we’re getting signals from the Voyagers. So getting a signal, like it’s several, I think the Voyagers are like 100 AU.
So this is five times farther than the Voyagers.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
25 times less signal.
Fraser Cain:
Yes, it’s harder. That’s why it’s a, did I not get to spend a hundred billion dollars or what? Fair.
A trillion dollars, whatever. But, but if we could, then we would, you know, and we had the targets, we had the candidates. So you’d need some other telescope, like the habitable planet finder first, then you would like, at night you would see their cities.
It’s crazy. What we could see. So we just need the solar gravitational lens telescope, please.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yes. For science.
Fraser Cain:
Yep. All right. That’s so, so if you’re ready to fund our ideas, let us know.
We’re ready to take over. Would we be co NASA?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yes.
Fraser Cain:
Chiefs?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Sure.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, we’d do that. That sounds good.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yes.
Fraser Cain:
All right. Thanks everyone. Thanks, Pamela.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Thank you, Fraser. And thank you so much to all of our $10 and up patrons out there. You allow us to keep the humans that make this show go going.
So specifically from Avivah, Rich and Ali, I would like to thank the following humans. This show is made possible by our community on patreon.com slash astronomy cast. This week, we’d like to thank the following $10 and up patrons.
Alex Cohen, Andrew Palestra, Arctic Fox, Bore Andro-Lovesville, Benjamin Davies, Boogie Nett, Brian Kilby, Kami Rassian, Cooper, David, Davias Rosetta, Don Mundus, Elliot Walker, Father Prax, Frank Stewart, Gerhard Schweitzer, Gordon Dewis, Hal McKinney, James Signovich, Jean-Baptiste Lemontier, Jim McGean, Joanne Mulvey, John M, J.P. Sullivan, Katie Byrne, Kimberly Rake, Larry Dzot, Lou Zeeland, Mark Phillips, Matt Rucker, Michael Prashada, Michelle Cullen, Name, Olga, Paul Jarman, Philip Grant, R.J. Basque, Ron Thorson, Sam Brooks and his mom, Scott Bieber, Subhana, Stephen Coffey, The Big Squish Squash, Tiffany Rogers, Tricor, Wanderer M101, and Zach Kukindel. Thank you all so very much.
Fraser Cain:
All right. Thanks, Pamela. We’ll see you next week.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Bye-bye.
Live Show#772: Gift Guide
It’s time once again for our annual gift-giving guide. We’ve got recommendations for books, movies, TV shows, games, and of course astronomy gear to satisfy the space nerds in your family. The Christmas season is almost upon us, and with it comes excuses to inject science into the lives of those you love… or ask for them to give you that book, lens, or art print you already know you’ll love. In this episode, Fraser and Pamela share the things they think would make good gifts for nerds like us.
Show Notes Astronomy & Science-Themed Gift Ideas- Recommended starter gift: astronomy binoculars (10×70 or 15×75, anti-reflective).
- First telescope suggestion: 6-inch Dobsonian for ease of use.
- Affordable smart telescope: Seestar S50 for easy astrophotography.
- C-Star telescopes for imaging nebulae in light-polluted areas.
- Gift cards for remote observatories in cloudy regions.
- Binoculars as foundational astronomy equipment.
- Smart telescopes for beginners wanting astrophotography.
- Book pick: “The Planets” by Andrew Cohen & Brian Cox (Folio Society).
- Value of physical books and media for inspiration.
- Magazine subscriptions: National Geographic, Scientific American, Sky & Telescope.
- Gift Patreon subscriptions for ad-free content (e.g., Universe Today).
- Encourage buying from small retailers (Peak Design, B&H Photo, Seestar).
- Importance of supporting journalists and content creators.
- Steam Deck gaming: recommended stand and 8-Bit Do controllers.
- Discussion of physical gaming and ergonomic setups.
- Lego sets (galaxies, Star Trek Enterprise) and preserving sets.
- Favorite board games: Sushi Go, Exploding Kittens.
- Magic: The Gathering deck themes (dinosaurs, meteors/lightning, space).
- MTG Arena as a digital way to play.
- TV series: Scavenger’s Reign.
- Movies: Mars Express (French animated sci-fi).
- Anime: Delicious in Dungeon, I May Be a Guild Receptionist…
- Book series: Dungeon Crawler Carl (isekai RPG sci-fi).
- Items from local game stores: squishables, Funko Pops, collectibles.
Fraser Cain:
Astronomy Cast, Episode 772 – Our 2025 Gift Guide. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly, facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today.
With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the Director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pamela, how are you doing?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I don’t know.
Fraser Cain:
We don’t know.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah, we’re recording this.
Fraser Cain:
Who knows how we’re doing? Totally, yeah. So in the moment, I’ve been recording a lot today, and I can hear my voice starting to go.
So I’m a little raspy now, but…
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I can feel my brain starting to go, so…
Fraser Cain:
Trade? Yeah. So I think this is…
I did finish off the Patrons question show that I do every month, so that was a couple of hours, and then we’ve already recorded another episode, and I’m going to do this one, and then I’m going to go… Anyway.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
A lot of using my voice in the last couple of days, and it’s definitely feeling like it’s had enough. But that’s okay, because I will be on vacation-ish, and let my voice rest.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
You just get to sit on an airplane tomorrow, and yeah, you just get to be quiet for, what, 28 hours?
Fraser Cain:
Something like that. Yeah, it’s ridiculous.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I forget.
Fraser Cain:
Carla was saying we’ve got like 24 hours of… 22 hours of flight time?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah, something like that. It’s going to be bonkers. Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
It’s time once again for our annual gift-giving guide. We’ve got recommendations for books, movies, TV shows, games, and of course, astronomy gear to satisfy the space nerds in your family. All right, so let’s just start with the…
I mean, this is the advice that we give every year, but I think I’ve got some more nuanced take on it now, but let’s give that bedrock, it’s time to buy your family members some kind of sky-watching gear.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yes. So, bedrock is an update from last year. I’m going to recommend B&H Photo as the company that is my new go-to for optics.
Buy the biggest pair of binoculars you can hold steady with your hands, because yes, you can put them on a tripod, no, you aren’t going to want to. You’re going to want to grab them, mine are hanging on a strap off of a doorknob. You’re going to want to grab them, step outside and go, can I see that comet, or whatever it is that you’re trying to see.
So buy the biggest, I like 10 by 70s, I own a pair of Celestrons, there’s excellent by many different companies, get ones that have a coating on the front, an anti-reflective that causes more photons to go through the lens than to get reflected off the lens, binoculars.
Fraser Cain:
And so it’s the one that I have, I have the 15 by 75 by Celestron, I was sort of checking the prices and they’re in the $100, $150, $200 range, and just bang for your buck. That if you want to get somebody just something that’s going to completely level up their astronomy experience, those binoculars. And I think both of us have owned our astronomy binoculars now for almost the entire time that we’ve been doing this show, and mine get used almost every day.
So I’m using them to look at birds, I’m using them to look at stuff in the sky, and you can see the moons of Jupiter, you can see the rings of Saturn, you can see the craters on the moon, you can see the individual stars in the Milky Way, you can see the galaxy in Andromeda. If you know where you’re looking, you know where to point them, then globular clusters, the Orion Nebula, it’s comets, it’s all available to you.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And then there’s also the, what is that bird in the tree? It’s much harder to do that with a telescope. So I…
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, they’re just fast and easy to use.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah, exactly.
Fraser Cain:
And so if you don’t have binoculars, that should be the foundation of your astronomy kit. So I’ve gone down the telescope journey quite a bit this year, and I think, yeah, I’ve got four of them behind me right now. But I think our original recommendation was the Dobsonian as your good first starter telescope for people.
And an eight inch is going to cost you quite a bit. It’s probably closing in on $1,000 or $800. But a six inch is…
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It’s totally easy to pick up and easy to use.
Fraser Cain:
Easy to pick up, easy to use.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And that’s still… Stick it on a table.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. A very big telescope. So if you want a first telescope, that’s the one that we recommend.
And then we used to recommend that you would then start to consider the more automated telescopes. Think about the Celestron, like an eight inch Schmidt-Cast grain or LX200 or something like that. And now my recommendation is to go the smart telescopes route.
And I highly recommend the Seastar S50, which is this great little… It’s the bigger one. It’s the bigger one, but it’s still relatively inexpensive.
They’re about $600. And take phenomenal pictures of the sky. And they’re super easy to use.
And there’s a lot of features in the telescope that I really like. Better than more expensive telescopes. And so that’s kind of affordable.
Like people are thinking about, oh, do I get my kid a PlayStation? Do I get a drone?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
No. You get one of these.
Fraser Cain:
Get a telescope.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It looks like an overhead projector that crossbred with a portal gun. And what amazes me is Aviva, the woman who does our website, our updates, all the behind the scenes stuff for AstronomyCast. She’s in Bandung, Indonesia, which is a suburb of Jakarta, which is a mega city.
And Bandung is what in the United States would be one of the largest cities. It’s a massive light polluted city. And she’s taking nebula images with her C-Star.
And it’s just sort of like you no longer have to be afraid of light pollution the way we grew up being afraid of light pollution. These C-Stars are just doing magic as near as I can tell.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Even if you live in light polluted area, there are light pollution filters. And so they’re great. So that’s it.
And then there are the accoutrement books like Nightwatch, which we always recommend. There are apps that you can use to help you find around the night sky, but you kind of don’t need them with the C-Star. You just find the list of the things you want to look at and you punch them on your phone and away you go.
So hopefully over the next several years, if you’ve got the budget, you will be building up your astronomy nerds tech.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
If you live someplace where you’re like, I’m not worried about light pollution. It’s simply always rains here. There’s Star Front Observatories and they are putting together a gift card system so that you can either buy a gift card to give to somebody or buy somebody a gift certificate to buy somebody.
I don’t make money from Star Front Observatories. I just think they are super cool and I use their telescopes now and then. So there’s now this way that you can get access to a C-Star in dark skies and just log into it on your computer.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. And like monthly pay at a monthly rate.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. It’s they’re looking at a Netflix for telescopes kind of model.
Fraser Cain:
Exactly. Okay. So we got the telescope recommendations out of the way.
So let’s move on to other stuff that we think is important. So pick a category that you think is relevant now.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So this part of the show is also me for anyone in my life who happens to also listen to this show and can like point my husband at things. I found a website, foliosociety.com, and they have a book called The Planets by Andrew Cohen and Brian Cox that is nothing but pretties, page after page after page of pretties. They have all sorts of other books as well.
And I really think that sometimes it just makes sense to say, I want to influence the people in my life by handing them something that is paper, that they’re going to feel encouraged to just randomly open to a different page and see what is there and be swept away by how amazing our universe is. So Folio Society, Megan Watsky and Kim Arcade, Kim Conwell Arcade have an entire collection of super pretty, pretty books. David Dickinson put together, along with you, I contributed randomness, put together a book a number of years ago on how to take your own pretty pictures.
Books are a way to change people’s lives in a way that doesn’t require them to poison their night vision the same way that a screen does. You can set one on your coffee table and people will flip through it. I mean, that’s why they’re called coffee table books.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. You know, I was sort of not a fan of physical media for a while then, and I’m coming back around now and kind of regret the ditching of the physical media that I did and am starting to rebuild my collection, my library. And, you know, physical books are great, as you said, you know, sometimes you just want to pick up a book and you want to look through it.
You want to read it. You want to look at the pictures. And astronomy is one of those fields where there are new missions, new telescopes, new images coming out all the time, and they capture well.
Astronaut photography, there’s memoirs from astronauts, you know, there’s a bunch of those kinds of books that you can get your hands on. And so, you know, you made some recommendations. So I would definitely suggest like some nice physical book that has nice imagery from space, something you can sit front and center and use it as a talking point when, you know, people come by or just like sit and read.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And I really think there’s a place for getting both older people who have spare time, so people who actually, I’ve heard of this mythological thing called retirement, I’m not quite sure what it is, and younger humans, so like high school, middle school, a subscription to a physical magazine, support publishing, National Geographic, Scientific American, Sky and Telescope is now part of the American Astronomical Society, but there I’d say Patreon with this guy, he’s over there, support the publishing industry and get physical subscriptions for people who have the time to just like sit and enjoy them. Because if you’re flipping through pages, you’re going to read articles you would never click on, on the landing page of a website. And Patreon now allows gift subscriptions.
So you can gift someone ad free forever on Universe Today, which has more media than any other astronomy site as near as I can tell.
Fraser Cain:
Mm hmm. Yeah, you can gift a year’s Patreon subscription to any patron. And so whatever the recipient is into, you can probably find a Patreon to support them.
And this is sort of another direction that I think is really important. We’re going to see this grow, is this direct support of journalism, of media creators, of the content that you enjoy. And it’s a way to give back, a way to make sure they can keep doing their job under all of the different threats that people are currently facing.
So someone in the chat is recommending you can buy a membership in the Planetary Society. So there’s like a whole bunch of these, and you can sort of give a person membership in something that is meaningful to them. Awesome.
I like that.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And the Dungeons and Dragons community, it is not astronomy. I just need to say the Patreon Dungeons and Dragons community is without comparison.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, there are map makers. There’s 3D miniature creators that you can download their designs and run them through your 3D printer. There’s adventure people who run, who design adventures and give all kinds of other support information for D&D.
Yeah, yeah. It’s pretty amazing how well supported the community is for role playing games.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And so I think find these small companies or even, I mean, Scientific American, it’s not huge when you compare it to a tech company. We’re talking like dozens of people, not tens of thousands of people. Find the places you can support directly.
And so even for like accessories, I would say, don’t go to Amazon, go to like Peak Design. They’re the place I go to buy tripods. You could murder somebody with a Peak Design tripod or simply observe through a tornado.
Pick one. Probably observe through a tornado, but go inside, leave the camera outside. Peak Design, B&H Photo, it’s another smaller company, buy direct from Seastar.
Just go direct, remove the middleman, remove the loss of income to the companies, keep the creators, the companies you enjoy going through this weird future.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. All right. So let’s talk about games.
So I want to talk about physical games and video games. I have been playing a lot of physical games recently. So video games still, my Steam Deck continues to be in heavy use.
It is my primary game machine. And I think if you’ve been following our recommendations for the last couple of years, we’ve recommended the Steam Deck. So you can also accessorize your Steam Deck, which is kind of cool.
I bought for my kids, I bought them the Steam Deck sort of stand. And so you sit on this little stand, you plug into the back of it, and then it gives you a bunch of expansion ports. So now you can hook up a bunch of controllers to it.
You can hook it up to your television. And now it acts like a game console, just as if you had an Xbox or a PlayStation, but it’s got your entire Steam library and it’s played on your TV. And then you can play like co-op games with it.
There’s a great set of controllers that come from a company called 8-Bit Do. And I’ve bought now two of their game controllers, and they’re just really nice, really great controllers. They’re not expensive and have much better gameplay than even like an Xbox controller or a PlayStation controller, and I highly recommend them.
So definitely check that out.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And those are a whole lot more ergonomic. I know one of the things I run into, and I have just like a cheapy controller to go with my Steam Deck, the Steam Deck, it’s kind of hefty to just like lay in bed and use it. And so having one of these stands, I have one in my living room where I have monitor arms, like you can’t move in my house without finding some place to dock your computer.
And so having it there, it’s now computer on an arm, I’m in my recliner, I’m playing games. Lightweight control in your hands. Yeah, it’s super pleasing.
Yeah. And don’t forget while you’re looking at games, so there are the old school board games galore out there, and then there’s also other toys that allow you to think creatively. Lego last year came out with a galaxy set, like it’s a picture of a galaxy that you can sit and build.
It’s pricey, but it’s gorgeous.
Fraser Cain:
Did you see what they added this year? No. It’s the Enterprise from the next generation.
That’s amazing. It’s so cool. It’s like 3600 pieces, like I’m sure it’s going to cost a fortune, but it is the, what Enterprise D?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so cool. So, yeah, it’s super tempting to, you know, again, a thing that I got rid of when I was a kid, all my space Lego and regretted, although I didn’t make that mistake again with my kids.
So we’ve got all of their Lego in storage and then we’ll be able to hand that off to their kids and hand that off to their kids. Like that stays within the family, like an endowment.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Except for the brown Legos. I don’t know what it is about brown Legos, but they have a half life and then they just crumble to bits.
Fraser Cain:
Oh, wow.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. Beware of the brown Legos. Yes.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. OK.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
All the others are fine, just not the brown ones.
Fraser Cain:
So so what are you playing in board game land?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I’ve so not that much that space related. We’ve been playing Sushi Go. It’s this little tin that you get and and you’re grabbing different sushi bits trying to build up the best meal we’ve been playing.
Oh, man, I have a wall of games and trying to remember all the stuff on the wall. Sushi Go is one of our go to’s. We’ve also been playing Exploding Kittens.
It’s an old classic. It never goes away.
Fraser Cain:
And you’ve been playing a lot of Magic the Gathering recently.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So much Magic the Gathering. And there’s actually a space related set that came out last month, Edge of Eternities. It has spacecraft.
It has space stations and it has lots of interesting, actually science related things. So one of the tasks on my to do list is I now have three different decks I need to build. One is dinosaurs.
The other is things like meteors, meteor crater, lightning, so I can kill the dinosaurs. Right. And now I also have the ability to build a space related deck and see if I can destroy goblins from space.
Fraser Cain:
That’s awesome.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Go to your local gaming store.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, but but you wouldn’t you were like I’ve been out of the Magic the Gathering space for a little while. And you’re saying that now the Magic Arena, you can relatively inexpensively collect cards in the game, play against other people. It will sort your deck.
It will shuffle between games. You can play quickly and you can play for fun. You can play ranked games against other people.
And it’s sort of a nice way to stay on top of the hobby without actually physically buying the cards. Although there’s nothing like owning the physical deck and sitting down and playing with a person in an actual room. That’s the way the game was meant to be played.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And this is where you can go find out when are they doing draft nights, things like that, where it’s not what you’ve collected. It’s paying an entry fee to get cards you can walk away with that everyone builds their own decks in real time.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Things like that. And another reason to go to your local game store is to just find out what is out there. Get introduced to the latest squishables, squishmallows, Funko Pops, all these different things that you can just insert joy into somebody’s life.
Last year, I found on a Funko Pop discount, like some of my friends’ favorite characters, I just got lucky. And who doesn’t love having a plague doctor in their life?
Fraser Cain:
So let’s talk about media.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
And this is funny because, again, I’ve recently been recollecting media and I’ve got sort of a stack of Blu-rays behind me that I’ve picked up at garage sales and Value Village and various discount shops. And it’s kind of filling in all of the gaps. And I know that I’m going to get to a point where I’ve collected all of the common movies and the uncommon movies, kind of like collecting Pokemons.
But it is. And then for the rares, you got to buy them. You’re going to have to order them from the store.
So there’s a couple of shows that I’ve really enjoyed in the last year or so that I thought people should want to check out. And you can buy these on Amazon and other media places. So one is Scavenger’s Reign.
And have you seen this yet?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I would know if you’d had.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, you’d know if you had. So it’s it’s it’s animated. It’s about these people that are on this weird world.
And it’s the strange biology based.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I’ve seen a few episodes that they go through. Yeah, I keep one of my friends watches it and I keep catching fragments of episodes at her house.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, I think it’s it’s it’s in my top ten television shows ever. Oh, wow. And there’s a nice Blu-ray you can buy that just has the whole collection ready to go.
And they’re it’s highly worth watching. Another movie that came out that sort of surprised me how good it was, was a movie called Mars Express. And it’s and it’s a French animated movie and is sort of like Blade Runner meets.
Man, it’s kind of like Blade Runner, but but it’s about a private detective and her robot assistant and they chase bad guys to Mars and sort of really cool technology, very funny dialogue, very well written. I really enjoyed it. And it’s a movie.
But if you can get your hands on it, definitely check that out. And then I think sort of one of the more endearing shows that I watched in the last year is called Delicious in Dungeon, which is an anime about some it’s like a D&D anime where some adventurers are trying to go down into this dungeon and they are running out of food and they’re trying to rescue their friends. And they and so one of them wonders, well, could we just cook the monsters?
And and so they meet up with this dwarf who has been had the exact same question. And so now the main characters are all delving deeper and deeper into this dungeon, encountering all kinds of horrific monsters and cooking and eating them and and then sort of surviving as they make their way down into the dungeon. And I just love it.
It’s so cozy and so endearing. Yeah, I think you’ll really for people really enjoy it. I checked in and there is DVDs available of that.
I’m not sure sort of, you know, if they have the audio that you find on Netflix, but yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So an anime, I I can’t even justify why I like it as much as I do. It’s just ridiculous is I may be a guild receptionist, but I’ll solo any boss to clock out on time. And it is the typical that’s the name of the anime.
Uh huh. The entire name is I may be a guild receptionist, but I’ll solo any boss to clock out on time. And it is literally the story of a a timeline where dungeons have opened up all over the place and they have adventurers that have to get licenses before they go down to take on the different bosses.
And this this girl works at the Adventurers Guild and she’s going home one day lamenting all of the overtime she has to do. And as the result of the needful prayer she puts out, she gets superpowers and now she just solo kills bosses. And it’s it’s just silly and sweet.
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And it has a ridiculous name.
Fraser Cain:
So one books, I want to just briefly mention some books. Yeah. And I haven’t been reading a ton of books that are kind of new and interesting.
But the one series that I read and really gobbled down was the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. So there’s like seven books and I just speed ran through all of them on the recommendation of my son. And they’re just terrific.
And so if you want to give somebody, you know, like if you enjoy light, entertaining reading, think about, you know, We Are Legion, We Are Bob. Think about The Martian. Think about Project Hail Mary in that sort of zone.
Then Dungeon Crawler Carl.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It’s an isekai, just to be clear. It’s an isekai.
Fraser Cain:
A role playing game fiction.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. But it’s not like the ones where it’s someone suddenly ends up only them in a different timeline. It’s the entire planet Earth becomes part of a game show.
And there are some lines in it that just stay with you. So the main character has a quote that is basically, they will not break me. They may hurt me.
They may kill me. They will not break me. And just that concept is especially in this timeline.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s a great it’s a great series.
You know, electronically, audiobooks, physical books, some of the best the narrator they heard.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Oh, my God. He’s the best. I thought it was a full cast recording.
It is not.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. Awesome.
Do you have any more final gift recommendations? Or are we all out?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I think that’s it.
Fraser Cain:
Get people’s physical media, buy things from the creators and support the support, the fandom of the person that you’re buying for, which is going to require a little investigative work on your part. So if there was like a patron that you wanted to join, who would it be?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Exactly. Son. Yeah, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Dad. You know, who would you want to support? Yeah.
Awesome. All right. Well, I hope everybody has a great holiday.
Please let us know if you have any additional recommendations or if you’ve taken action on any of our recommendations. We are not funded. We’re not advertising.
We receive no sponsorship from any of the things we talked about here.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So go forth, be awesome. And thank you to our patrons. We thank the $10 and up patrons at the end of every episode.
And today we would like to thank, and this is where Rich inserts the audio. This show is made possible by our community on patreon.com slash astronomy cast. This week, we’d like to thank the following $10 and up patrons.
Alan grass, Andrew Allen, and to soar Aster sets, Benjamin carrier, Bob Krell, Brian breed, buzz Parsec, Conrad Howling, Daniel Schecter, David green, Dr. Whoa. Ed Fairchild. Just as it sounds.
Frederick Salvo, Jeff McDonald gold, Gregory Singleton, Jay, Alex Anderson, Jason Kwong, Jeremy Kerwin, J O John Herman, Jordan Turner, Kate Sindretto, Kim Barron, Lab Rat Matt, Les Howard, Mark, Masa Herleu, MHW1961, Super Symmetrical, Michael Regan, Nyla, Noah Albertson, Paula Sposito, Peter, Red Bar Is Watching, Robert Plasma, Sachi Takeba, Scone, Sergey Manalov, Stephen Rutley, T.C. Starboy, Thomas Gazzetta, Travis C. Porco, Vitaly, William Andrews. Thank you all so very much.
Fraser Cain:
All right. That’s great. Thanks, Pamela.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Thank you.
Fraser Cain:
See you next week.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Bye-bye.
Live Show#771: Comet Tails
With the arrival of the comet 3I/Atlas (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System), the world is getting a crash course in comets, their behavior, and of course their tails. Today we’re going to talk about comets and their tails, why they exist, how they grow, why they can be different colors and how they can be sometimes point AT the Sun.
Comets are one of the most animated and ephemeral targets for astronomy. From night to night they can change in shape and color, and every nuance tells us something. In this episode, we decode blue tails, green cores, forward-facing plumes, and other weird and awesome details observed with these icy visitors.
Show Notes- What comet tails are and how they form
- Sublimation, dust release, and the creation of the coma
- Differences between ion tails and dust tails
- How solar radiation and magnetic fields shape comet tails
- Why comet tails always point away from the Sun
- Color changes in comets and what causes them
- Explaining the “anti-tail” and strange comet behavior
- Comet 3I/ATLAS and public misinformation
- Potential spacecraft interaction with comet tails
- What happens as a comet moves away from the Sun
Fraser Cain:
Astronomy Cast, Episode 771 Comet Tales. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the Publisher of Universe Today.
With me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay, Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the Director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pam, how are you doing?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I’m doing well. I am very envious of the amazing adventure you’re about to go on. It sounds so cool.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, we’re going to do a month in Thailand. Not for any purpose, but to escape the Canadian winter.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And we are about to record a bevy of shows. And so there’s going to be very boring intros because we’re just going to sit and do them.
Fraser Cain:
How are you doing? I don’t know how I’m doing because we recorded this in advance. I have to assume that I’m fine.
So yeah. I saw an elephant. I went to a temple.
I ate some really tasty Thai food. I don’t know. I don’t know.
With the arrival of Comet 3i Atlas, the world is getting a crash course on comets, their behavior, and of course, their tails. Today we’re going to talk about comets and their tails. Why they exist, how they grow, why they can be different colors, and how they can sometimes point at the sun.
So I’ve ranted quite a bit on my channel about how awesome Comet 3i Atlas is.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yes.
Fraser Cain:
And my frustration at the nonsense that is proliferating on YouTube. And there is a lot of nonsense. You know, on the best case, you have people who are writing scientific papers that go against the scientific mainstream and much to the eyebrow raising of their scientific colleagues, not naming any names, pointing any fingers.
And on the worst case, you’ve just got people making stuff up, just literally going, it broke into 17 pieces. And now we’ve got spaceships that are flying out of it and laser beams and people receiving communications. And, you know, it’s so, and a lot of it rests on the behavior of its tail.
I know. So I think today, let’s just, just hammer comet tails as until we really, really understand the whole process. And that will give us a lens from which to both understand this comet and every comet that will ever show up again in the future.
So I guess, what is a comet tail?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It is material that has been removed by some form of physics from the nucleus of the comet. And the reason I phrased it that way is we have two different processes going on. One is your standard stuff melts, which actually in this case means sublimation.
So you have all the volatiles, all the frozen stuff that as it gets energy injected into it either from solar heating or because there’s been landslides or something like that, that inserted kinetic energy, some form of energy got inserted and that raised temperatures, caused phase transitions. And now you have stuff that has gone from solid to gas. Now the solid going to gas is a wild change in volume and this can eject dust at all sorts of different velocities in all sorts of different directions.
And so you also have dust getting ejected from the comet nucleus. So around your comet, you have expanding gas, you have dust, and all of this stuff can be slightly different colors depending on what’s going on.
Fraser Cain:
And so dust, it’s very interesting. For a while there, we’ve always talked about dust as this thing and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. And so talked to a bunch of scientists and was like, okay, look, if I could hold some dust in my hand, what would it look like?
If I could throw dust up in the air, what would it look like? And the best example is essentially smoke coming from a fire that you’ve got these, what’s it, polyachromatic carbon compounds. Polycyclic aromatic compounds.
Hydrocarbons. Yeah, hydrocarbons. The soot coming from hydrocarbons that are then mixed in particles of this soot, and these are very small particles, you know, they are micrometers across, they are mixed in with the volatile elements, the frozen nitrogen, the frozen oxygen, frozen carbon dioxide on the surface of this comet.
And so then as this gas is sublimating off of the surface, you’ve also got these PACs. Is that right? Yeah.
The soot, this dust. PAHs. PAHs.
That’s it. Right. Yeah. You’ve got this soot being lofted into the environment around the comet as well. And this is going to be important when we sort of come back around to it.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
All right. So the way I always think of it is they’re just really big molecules and sometimes they’re multiple molecules that have decided to gang up and join forces to build slightly bigger things. Right.
And this is where it’s important to remember they can have different sizes. And sometimes it’s not the kind of dust you’re talking about, which is like the stuff that lives between the stars, the interstellar space, the dust of why it’s really hard to see through clouds of material, the dust that makes the horse and the horsehead nebula. Sometimes dust is just grains of material because comets are made of rocks and ices.
And so we get all these different grain sizes and some of these grains are actually the stuff that’s eventually going to form meteor showers. Less exciting than polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, easier to spell, and cause really cool light shows.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. I love Nicole did her science experiment at one of the, I think at Dragon Con one year and had dry ice and bits of…
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Oh yeah. Made a comet.
Fraser Cain:
And made a comet. Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
And all of the raw material. A bit of dirt, a bit of regularized dry ice, cooking oil, all of this stuff, mixed it all together and made a ball. And then you watch as the carbon dioxide is sublimating off of the surface of it and bits and pieces of it are dropping off onto the ground.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. Add a little bit of ammonia in there. It’s really cool.
And so all of this stuff, when you take that dirty snowball that has been going through interplanetary space, interstellar space, it has been gathering on its surface all of the dust. And it’s also had very slow chemical reactions going on that form these larger molecules. So as it comes into the solar system, it experiences gravity from other objects, which can cause landslides and it experiences solar heating.
Both of these factors can cause activity, which is also why we see centaurs that get active sometimes out beyond Jupiter in the outer solar system. And this kind of activity is going to shed dust.
Fraser Cain:
Right.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And that dust is going to reflect light and it’s going to reflect predominantly redder light because it’s really big stuff. So the reflection goes all the way into the reds. And so looking at a lot of comets when they first start to get active in the outer solar system and 3i Atlas is utterly unsurprising.
It’s remarkable, but also utterly unsurprising. And it started out by doing the, I’m going to be red right now thing. And yeah, it was awesome.
Fraser Cain:
Right. And, and so this idea of the, I mean, what we’re talking about here is the coma and when you look at a comet and you see this diffuse blob in your telescope, that is the coma. The nucleus is down there inside.
Sometimes you can’t even resolve the nucleus. Sometimes you can, but then around that is the coma. And the coma can be hundreds of kilometers across while the nucleus may just be five kilometers or one kilometer and it can just produce enough material that makes this larger, brighter object that you can, that you can see.
So how does the coma become the tail?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So we have two different processes that, that we need to keep track of and a third that occasionally happens that we’ll get to. So the tails, there’s normally both an ion tail and a dust tail. And the ion tail is rogue molecules.
So like C2, I’m not talking the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons here, I’m talking like C2, sodium, methane, just the super simple little tiny stuff you can build with tinker toys and not hate yourself in the process. Right So, so that stuff can form ion tails and the ion tails, as the name implies, are charged. So because they are charged as the solar wind of high energy particles, as the sun’s magnetic field interacts with these charged particles, it, it forms a, a tail that is distinctly separate from the dust tail, which is the second tail. And the dust tail tends to be made of bigger stuff.
And that bigger stuff has its location influenced by the motion of the comet. So it’s leaving stuff behind as it goes. And it’s getting pushed by the not charged light of the sun, photons aren’t charged.
Fraser Cain:
But I think it’s really important. Like, I think we have this terrestrial in atmosphere concept of, you even said it, leaving stuff behind. But this stuff is, is coming off of the comet and has the same momentum as the comet itself.
And if there was no sun, no solar wind, then this diffuse ball would just continue along with the comet, its gravity would pull it back down onto it and that would be that. But because the solar wind is interacting with it, it’s causing a force against its motion that is pushing it away from the comet. And so when you see this tail, it’s still moving at roughly the same speed as the comet, but a little bit slower and in a little bit different direction.
And that’s why the tail starts to grow out from the comet as it gets warmer, more activity on surface, more comas produced, more of this material gets separated into the ion tail and the regular dust tail. And that’s how we see that. And then just the size of the tail will depend on how much radiation this thing has received, how close it is to the sun, and then what its composition is depending on the sublimation temperature.
All right, so that’s how we get the tail. Now, what about the color of the tail? Because that changes from comet to comet.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah, and it is a function and it can change over time as different stuff gets revealed. And it’s a function of composition. And one of the mistakes that is easy to make is, oh, are aurora colors and comet colors related?
Yes and no. It is the same physics, but because it’s working in different regimes with different energies involved, we’re seeing different reactions. So we see red in comets, we see red in aurora, different causes.
The red in comets comes from either scattering off of dust, less exciting, or sometimes, very rarely, we get super lucky and there is sodium in the tail that ends up being really cool, bright, if you have the right filters and you expose long enough, red. So you can get red in the comet tail and it’s not associated with the ion tail, it’s associated more with the dust tail towards the ion tail because it’s like its mass puts it in between. I just want to go back to this mass thing again.
The reason you get a different spreading out of the dust tail is different mass particles get pushed with different efficiency. A low mass particle is going to like totally get flung out by solar light pressure. Heavier mass stuff is like, I’m just going to hang back here, you’re not going to push me quite so hard.
So it spreads out as a function of mass and then the ion tail is just like, I am small and narrow. It’s the way it works.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of amazing that the magnetic field of the plasma coming from the sun in the solar wind is grabbing those ions, locking them into place and moving them directly while the dust tail, it’s more of a transfer of momentum from the particles in the solar wind that are bonking into them as opposed to just that really tight coupling of the electromagnetic field of the magnetism.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Students are so glad I’m not teaching physics one right now because this is entirely a case of an object in motion stays in motion until acted upon by another force. And we have two forces acting on all of these things. The electromagnetic force and then we also have impulse, which is easier to solve as a transfer of momentum problem from photons.
And so the dust, the electromagnetic force, just it’s like not as big a thing, even if the dust is charged because those molecules are so big. But the bigger they are, the more light is hitting them and pressing them. But the harder it is to move it, it all balances out.
It’s an amazing set of just balance the forces and remember the inertia.
Fraser Cain:
Right. But you would you would require like for homework for your students, you would be requiring two different sets of calculations. One is all about the impulse, while the other one is about calculating the what the magnetic moment as the.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
No, it’s the sum of the forces. So you’re taking the electromagnetic force and you’re taking the it’s the impulse from getting hit by the photons. Right.
So, yeah, you just sum the forces and you do it as a function of these things have this much a charge and this much mass. This stuff has this much charge and this much mass. And so I’d have them run the calculations for some random dust grain I pulled out of a textbook and then for a charged, probably just charged carbon atom.
Fraser Cain:
Right. Yeah. So let’s talk about some sort of strange behaviors that we might see from comets.
So one of the things that was very interesting with Comet 3i Atlas right at the very beginning, we were super lucky that we detected it early on on its way inbound. We didn’t get that with Borisov and with Oumuamua. Right.
Astronomers were able to watch this strange anti-tail, essentially material that was making its way towards the sun. What was going on there?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So two problems. One was human language and the other was lots of dust. So what it actually had was a forward facing plume.
But because they’re so used to talking about comet tails, people are like, it has a tail facing the sun. Right. That’s not a thing, people.
So what was happening is you have this chunk of dust covered ice. The front part facing the sun is heating up in the sunlight. Dust actually helps stuff heat up because it’s dark.
So it absorbs. And if you have a grain of dust with ice behind it, and that ice gets warm, gets warm, sublimates. When it sublimates and expands, it’s going to fire the dust straight out towards the sun in this case.
So the reason there was a plume facing towards the sun is that was dust getting fired off the surface of the comet as the comet warmed up and just flung that dust straight off.
Fraser Cain:
Right. And that’s the kind of thing that you would expect to see early on before enough light pressure has built up to really start to push that tail back away from it.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Well, more than that, it was just that much dust and heating at that point.
Fraser Cain:
Right.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So once you get all the dust off of it, and that’s part of what’s happening is they’re literally cleaning the surface off.
Fraser Cain:
But, right. But all I’m saying is that, you know, in the beginning, there’s not enough light pressure coming from the sun to really produce that long tail. So instead, you get this heating on the side that’s facing.
It ejects a bunch of dust towards the sun. That’s kind of, you know, it’s got that initial velocity off of the surface of the comet. And then over time, as it gets closer and closer and closer, then the light pressure of the solar wind starts to pick up and push that stuff away into that proper tail that you, you know, that we always expect.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. There’s a one over R squared relationship for those who like math. So basically, you’re far away.
There’s less sunlight, you get closer in, there’s more sunlight per square meter. And so it’s literally the closer in you get, the more sunlight is pushing against you. So it’s two different factors.
But yeah, yeah, totally.
Fraser Cain:
So let’s talk about how the tail is facing away from the sun. And it’s, it makes the comet look like when it’s going towards the sun, it looks like a burning fireball that’s on its way towards the sun. Yeah.
But when it’s going away from the sun, it appears as if it’s going in reverse.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So, so in general, if you look at a comet, from a top down view of its orbit relative to the sun, you can draw a line from the sun towards the comet, and its tail will arc away from the sun and towards where it came from. And what’s happening is, as it moves, sunlight, literally the pressure from the light, is pushing the material away. And as it moves, this part has now been pushed for a longer period of time, this part has been pushed for a longer period of time.
So that bit of curvature is reflecting the fact that where it was has now been pushed out. With Comet 3i Atlas, there’s actually this really neat case where over time, the tail is going to get pushed out to where Hera and Europa Clipper are now. So potentially, it’s not that the missions are going to fly through the comet tail, it’s they’re continuing their journey and the sun is pushing the comet tail past them.
Fraser Cain:
Right.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And that’s awesome.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, if we’re unlucky, it’ll be about 8 million kilometers away from Europa Clipper. But if we’re lucky, it might actually go right through that tail.
And Europa Clipper is equipped with the kinds of tools on board to be able to study the particles, if it can get close enough to be able to analyze them. And that is the, I mean, this is a comet that formed in another star system. This is a gift that the universe has sent to us to say, hey, study this.
And we happen to have a spacecraft that is perfectly positioned that it might actually be able to study it.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And so yeah, the sun is pushy, light is pushy, magnetic fields like to move things around. All of these factors are working at different ways to move things.
Fraser Cain:
So one of the things that’s happened, and this happened in 3i Atlas, although this happens regularly, is that the color of the comet has shifted. So you mentioned early on that it started out red and then has recently, or I guess has been brightening and also shifting more into the blue. Right.
And I think people are misunderstanding this because they’re saying, so it was a red comet in the beginning and now it’s a blue comet?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
This is just normal. So it started out shedding dust, all the dust, dust beyond to you. And then as it continued to heat up, we began to see a, I always have to look at how to say this, diatomic carbon reaction.
So what’s happening is you have C2 molecules, you hit them with one photon and they go, oh, wait, what’s going on here? You hit them with a second photon, they lose an electron. That electron wants to come back.
And when it does, it releases a green photon. So this is a really weird reaction because it requires two photons before the molecule decides, oh, green is going to happen now. So carbon molecules in the coma of the comet are getting excited.
They shine green, tail is reflecting sunlight. There’s still that ion tail, not a sodium tail that I’ve seen reported. Now, as the comet was getting close into the sun, temperature profile is changing, new things are getting revealed.
They’re reporting as it comes out from behind the sun and from spacecraft that have been able to continue seeing it. It’s above the plane of the solar system. So it is behind and above the sun and then coming back around as it continues in towards the disk of the solar system.
And it has begun to have significant green light. And that’s actually coming from copper in the comet. And copper is, again, something perfectly normal.
This is just atoms getting happy, exciting their electrons. Those electrons come back down, they release light. And in this case, the light they’re releasing is blue.
Fraser Cain:
Right. But my understanding as well is that the, you know, when you see it from a spectroscopy perspective, you’re looking at the color that’s coming from the comet. And is the light predominantly moving into the reddish end of the spectrum and the bluish end of the spectrum?
And, you know, astronomers will do spectroscopy on an asteroid and they’ll say, this is a bluer asteroid, that is a redder asteroid. And if you look at the two asteroids, like, I can’t tell the difference. But to astronomers, it’s more about like, what colors of reflected light are coming off of this object?
And it is going to be subtly towards the blue or subtly towards the red. This is not subtle. Well, but part of this is coming from the composition of the coma.
If it’s more dust dominated, then you’re getting things that are pushing a little bit more into the red. And if it’s more gas dominated, you know, sublimated volatiles, then it’s going to be a little bit more blue.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So this is one of those topics where nothing is clean. Literally, it’s covered in dust. Nothing is clean.
So you have the black body radiation, which is a continuum of color at all the different colors. That was a stupid statement. And that will shift slightly back and forth depending on how light is getting scattered, how it’s getting reflected.
And temperatures. Then on top of it, you have emission lines. And the emission lines are like, and right here, we are now going to inject, pick something.
Sodium is something that sometimes gets picked by these, like I mentioned before, in which case you’re adding a spike of red.
Fraser Cain:
Cyanide?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah, yeah. And so these are suddenly emission lines. And in cities, we can see how like flying over a city, a city will appear super yellow because of all of the compressed sodium lights.
That is just one specific color that’s getting injected on top of all the other colors from everything else going on in the city. Well, comets have this black body, the scattered light and emission lines all adding up together to produce their colors.
Fraser Cain:
And what does the future hold for the tail of the comet? What makes it go away in the end?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So it depends on the comet. The short term answer is as that sucker moves further and further out away from the sun, it was closest to the sun on October 30th, as it moves further and further away from the sun, it is going to cool off. All of the awesome sublimation that’s currently taking place is going to stop.
It’s going to become a smaller solid object. Now, one of the things that is interesting is the perspective we’re going to have on this. Our perspective as it moves away, it’s going to be heading almost directly out of our solar system when it’s at opposition with the Earth.
So it’s going to be moving out of the solar system. Its tail is going to be getting pushed faster than it is moving. So the nucleus is going to be flying into the tail.
And we’re going to be watching it from behind. And we’re just going to see something that’s, coma is getting smaller and smaller over time, which is a sad perspective. But also just like, this is the comet that was determined.
It was not going to give people on the Earth a really clear view of what was going on. Someone has to be at the tail end of the pretty view or terrible view end of the Gaussian distribution. We landed on the tail end, giving us the worst view possible of this particular object.
Fraser Cain:
All right. Well, I think hopefully everyone now understands comet tails and we’re ready for that wonderful future, incredible comet that will grace the skies any day now. Right, Universe?
Thanks, Pamela
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Thank you, Fraser. And thank you to all of our $10 and up patrons out at patreon.com slash astronomycast. This show is made possible by our community on patreon.com. slash astronomycast.
This week, we’d like to thank the following $10 and up patrons. Adam Anise Brown, Alexis, Andy Moore, Astro Bob, Bebop Apocalypse, Bob Zatsky, Brett Moorman, Bury Gowman, Cody Rose, Daniel Loosley, David Gates, Dizastrina, Dwight Elk, Evil Melky, Flower Guy, Galactic President Scooper Star McScoopsalot, Glenn McDavid, Greg Vylde, Helge Bjorkhag, Jarvis Earl, Jeff Wilson, Jim of Everett, John Drake, Jonathan H. Staver, Justin S., Kenneth Ryan, Kinsella Panflinco, Lee Harbourn, Marco Iorassi, Mark Steven Raznak, Matthias Hayden, Michael Wichman, Mike Hizzi, Nick Boyd, Paul D. Disney, Pauline Middleink, Randall, Robert Cordova, Sergio Sanchevier, Sergio Sansevero, Shersom, Semyon Torfason, Slug, Taz Tully, The Lonely Sandperson, Time Lord Iroh, Van Ruckman, Will Hamilton. Thank you all so very much.
Fraser Cain:
All right. Thanks, Pamela. And we will see you next week.
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