Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What is Zodiacal Light?

Episode Date: December 21, 2021

Daniel and Jorge talk about the amazing physics of space DUST. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Don't let anything keep you from discovering the half of the workforce who are stars. Workers skilled through alternative routes rather than a bachelor's degree. It's time to tear the paper ceiling and see the stars beyond it. Find out how you can make stars part of your talent strategy at tear the paperceiling.org. Brought to you by opportunity at work and the ad council. Hi, it's Jorge and Daniel here, and this holiday season, if you're looking for a gift for yourself, for a friend, or for your family, why not get them the gift of answers about the universe?

So check out our new book, frequently asked questions about the universe. You can find details at universef aq.com. Thanks for supporting the podcast. Happy holidays, everyone. Hey, Jorge, what words come to mind when you look up at the night sky? I don't know, maybe a celestial, cosmic, clear, crisp? You never think, like, dusty or dirty? What do you mean?

Like, space is dirty? Yeah, actually space turns out to be super dusty. and that dust doesn't even stay up there in the sky. There are literal tons of space dust falling on Earth every day. Man, are you saying the universe is like a slob? I know, right? Like, come on, universe, clean up your mess. The universe is like a bad roommate.

At least you have someone else to blame for your house being dusty. We need to get like a space vacuum. Mega made. Wait, isn't the space already in a vacuum? How can it be dusty? Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I like getting a little bit of space dust in my eye. Oh yeah? You'd like to sprinkle a little space magic in your face every once in a while?

Well, you know, we all are made of stardust, and so it's just sort of like a reunion between these little bits of matter that might have burned inside a star billions of years ago and been missing each other ever since. Wow. Does it make you like tear up literally and figuratively when you think about space dust? Literally it does, yes. Also, I think dust just gains a whole new kind of level when you put the word star in front of it. Like if you say we're made out of star dust, that sounds awesome. But if you say we're made out of dust, you usually don't want that until after you die. Yeah, does that work for other things like star trash? Does that sound exotic and fantastic? Star dirty dishes. Star chores. There you go. There you go. I'll sell that to my kids. You don't just have chores. You have star chores. Then maybe we should get your star kids to do it, they'll say.

They are stars. They are stars in my world. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio. In which exploring the universe is not a chore, but a great joy. because we cast our minds out there into the deep universe through the clouds of gas and dust, penetrating into everything that's out there and trying to get an answer for you. Answers about the biggest, deepest, oldest, most important questions in the universe. How big is everything? What's it all made out of?

How does it all work? Can it possibly make sense? And what is the latest crazy thing that we have learned about the universe? Wait, are you saying that my allowance doesn't depend on me doing this podcast? Depends on which allowance you're talking about. Do I get paid anyways? That doesn't sound right. Either do the podcast or do the dishes, so which is more fun?

I can do the dishes anyways. But anyways, yeah, you're right. It is a huge universe full of mysterious things and a lot of interesting things to discover and learn about because the universe is a surprising place all the time. It's surprising us with new truth, new ways in which it works. But only sort of if we get to see it, right? Only if we get a good view of what's going on out there.

And it's an amazingly good view that we have. It's incredible how far you can see out into space. You know, if you stand on the top of a mountain and you can see 50 miles, 100 miles, you think, wow, this is Instagram worthy. Well, you are sitting on top of an earth-sized mountain looking out billions and billions of light years into space. They can give you a bit of vertigo sometimes if you think about it, but it's really the best view in the universe. Yeah, and it's not just a nice view. It's like a 360 all-over view, right?

Like, it's up and down, left and right, all over. In every direction, we can see out millions and millions and millions of miles away. Yeah, almost every direction. I mean, the earth isn't transparent. It would be pretty cool if the earth was, like, made of glass. So you could see in every direction at the same time. That sounds like an episode idea, Daniel. What if the earth was made out of glass?

That sounds like an episode of Black Mirror. Should you throw stones at it? But then the stones would mean out of glass, too. But if somebody turned the earth in the glass, then we would have no night and be pretty hard to sleep. So maybe that wasn't such a great idea. Well, I guess what I mean is like, you know, people in Australia are, you know, also getting a pretty good view of the universe and we're getting a pretty good view. And people in Europe are getting a pretty good view. It's like we're surrounded by infinite emptiness almost in crystal clear emptiness in all directions. It is pretty amazing. And we've been looking out at the sky for a long time, right, for thousands and thousands of years. Proto humans probably looked up at stars and wondered what they are. And these days, we have a pretty good picture for what most of what we're seeing is. The thing that's sort of incredible is, is that there's still stuff out there that we don't really understand. Yeah, it's pretty amazing that you think after all this time of looking up,

you know, with powerful telescopes and incredible spacecraft that go out there to explore it, there might still be things that we don't fully understand about what's out there and where it comes from. Yeah, and not just things that scientists can see through their powerful telescopes, things that you can see with your eyeballs, naked eye observations. Some of those things we still don't understand. Yeah, so to the end of the podcast, be asking the question what is zodiacal light now did i pronounce that correctly zodiacal or zodiacal you say zodiacal i'll say zodiacal let's call the whole thing off and go have some tomatoes and tomatoes

i think of it as zodiacal because i think it comes from the zodiac um zodiac right but zodiac zodiac zodiac has the emphasis on the oh so wouldn't be zodiacal light does it though i say zodiac not zodiac You say Zodiac or Zodiac. And welcome to a podcast about linguistics. Well, maybe this should be a podcast episode about the Zodiac Killer. Those are very popular, those crime podcasts. Isn't he the senator for Texas right now? We'll say no more.

We'll say no more. About the Star State. But reorienting ourselves back up to the night sky, I do think it's really pretty awesome that there are things you can see out there with your naked eye that scientists are still trying to figure out. It means that, you know, there are still puzzles out. there. There's still things that are huge and big and obvious that have mysteries behind them. Yeah. And like you say, you don't need a big telescope to see this big mystery, this

Zodical Light. It's something you can see with your naked eye almost every day, right? Yeah, technically. It's kind of hard to spot, but if you know where to look, you can see it. So it's kind of an interesting thing. I've never heard of this before. I have to say, I was a little puzzled when I got the outline for this, but it's pretty interesting and it's kind of a big mystery. That's right. And it's an active area of research. Amazingly, it even connects to popular music. All right, let's get into it. But first, we were wondering how many people out there had heard of this idea,

this concept, this phenomenon of the zordical light. And so Daniel went out there to ask people on the internet if they have heard of zordical light. So those of you out there on the internet may be doing your dishes right now, who would like to participate for future episodes of the podcast? It's easy. Just write me a message to questions at danielanhorpe.com. I'll send you the questions back,

and you can record your answers. the privacy of your own home with or without the sounds of dishes. So think about it for a second. If you were talking to a physicist, what would you guess is Zordicalite? Here's what people had to say. If I will receive this question from somebody else, then you, I would think it's something about Virgo or something, but this coming from you. I don't know what to answer right now.

My guess of what zodiacal light or zodiacal light is would be maybe the light from space that doesn't consist of man-made objects. So our original mapping of the stars before we started including satellites and whatnot. Light that comes from the zodiac constellations? Light that comes particularly from constellations or things of that nature? I mean, the zodiac stars are real, I guess they're out there, and is there light special? Surely not, just arbitrary stars, aren't they? The zodiac, I believe that's the 12 constellations that rotate throughout the year, hence astrologist saying things like, the sun is in Virgo.

Maybe zodiacal light is light coming from objects that are in the Earth's orbital plane and are therefore obscured by the sun. Right. Pretty interesting answers. Most people, I guess, connected it to the, like we said, the zodiac, or as you pronounce it, zodiac. Now you're making me self-conscious about it. It's in the stars, Daniel. Oh, no, this is not going to become an astrology podcast. That may that might make us more popular.

We start predicting people's futures. I foresee more physics in your future, Danny. Me too. Me too. I'm not sure if that's a prediction or a curse. Well, I'm guessing it's related to the zodiac, like the zodiac signs, right, which are the constellations like Leo and what are some of the other constellations? Gemini, cancer, yeah, all those, exactly. But you're not a big fan of constellations, right? I've heard you rant about them before. Constellations are fun to look at, but they're not really astronomy because when you look at a constellation in the sky, it's totally just an artifact of where we happen to be in space.

like the stars in a constellation aren't clustered together in the universe. Sometimes some of them are very close and other ones are like deep, deep, deep in space. It just happens to be from our perspective that they make a specific pattern. They're not really anything astronomical. They have no meaning or information.

But you know, they are a way in. They are like people look at the stars and they look at these constellations. It's sort of a way in. But to me, it's a little bit like, you know, teaching people about meteorology and starting with the Greek gods of weather or something. Well, this is when I feel like it's a little bit different because, you know, the constellations were part of astronomy at some point in human history, right?

Like there were a way for humans to start mapping the night sky or like keeping track of how things were moving in the night sky. Yeah, I'm not really sure that's astronomy. I mean, it's definitely important for navigation and for understanding where you are on the earth and stuff. But, you know, astronomy, like the study of the universe and the stars and trying to understand what's really going on out there. I don't know. The constellations don't really play a big role in that. in my opinion. But, you know, of course, they have historical importance.

And they are what a lot of people like to look at. And you look up at the night sky and spot them. That part is fun. Right. And they determine your future. You're just baiting me. You're just baiting me. You're just a skeptic because you're in Aries, right?

I'm not even in Aries, as if that made any difference. I almost got you there. No, you're trying to paint me into the anti-fun corner. It's definitely fun to look at the constellations and to think about this stuff. Just, you know, don't confuse it with actual science. Well, and actually, it's sort of a red herring because the zordical light has almost nothing to do with the constellations, right? That's right. It has almost nothing to do with the constellations, except that it appears along the ecliptic, this plane of rotation of the solar system. You know, the plane that the planets are on and the earth moves around, which is sort of a line in the sky where we see the planets, where the sun moves along, for example.

This is what we call the ecliptic. Oh, right. The zodiacal light, or zodiacal. light appears along the ecliptic and you know which is also where a lot of constellations appear and so i think that's why it's called zodiacal light oh right yeah because i guess our entire solar system is in a disk right all of the planets that we know are on a disk and so in the night sky they all follow the same line right i've never sort of thought about it too hard before yeah planets should definitely fall in a line like if you're looking up in the night sky and you see three bright

objects that are not in a line then they can't all be planets because they all are in a disc You know, we are on that disc also, you know, we see them line up. And it's roughly the same line that the sun moves along. Oh, interesting. Yeah, they all sort of follows the same line, like the like a beats and a string. Yeah, and so that's super cool to think about because it gives you like a 3D perspective where we are in the solar system. It's easy to imagine sort of things moving across our sky as if they're sort of like on a screen. But if you make like a mental switch, you can realize I'm looking out and things are at different distances.

and I'm really seeing a 3D view of this incredible cosmic object, the solar system, right? And I'm seeing like bits of it that are further and further away. It's really, it's kind of incredible. It can make you almost fall over when you realize the scale of the thing that you're looking at. And so maybe step us through this. What is then zodical light or zodiacal light? And I'm guessing it's something then that happens in the plane of the solar system. Yeah, exactly.

Now, people are familiar with like the northern lights or the southern lights. That's caused when high energy particles hit the atmosphere and then spiral up to the North Pole or the South Pole because of the magnetic field. And you can only really see those if you're sort of pretty far north or pretty far south because that's where those particles end up. But the Zodiac light is pretty cool because you don't have to be in the North Pole or the South Pole or even pretty far north or south to see it. You can see it from almost anywhere on the Earth and it's actually most visible near the equator in the tropical regions. And what it looks like is sort of a cone of light, like a hazy, bright pyramid. It's not very crisp. It's not as colorful.

It's sort of white that appears above the sunrise or the sunset point. So you can see it just like just after the sun has set or just before the sun is going to rise. I see. So like as the sun is dipping down below the mountains, as it dips down below sort of the horizon or the mountains that you're looking at, you'll suddenly see like a column or like a huge pyramid of light above it. Yeah, and it happens after the sun is already past the horizon. So you see the sunset, you see the afterglow, et cetera, all that red beautifulness. And then before the dark night really kicks in, you see this glow, this pyramid.

And I wouldn't say it's like sudden. It doesn't just like pop into your sky. You know, it's sort of as the sun is fading, this is sort of what's left. Interesting. And, you know, people can look at this up on the internet and do a Google image search of zodical light and they can get some pretty impressive pictures. they're pretty beautiful. Yeah, some of those pictures

are obviously taken by professional photographers in ideal conditions after years of practice. So you can also see some amateur photographs. You could also just sort of have seen it

and not really realized it because it can kind of look a little fuzzy. You can look just sort of like a smear of light. You might have imagined, oh, it's just like light from a city over the horizon,

you know, light pollution from a nearby football field or something. Right, but it's pretty concentrated, right? Like it has a particular shape, right? Like it's not like a semi-circle or it's not, doesn't take over half of the sky.

It's like, you know, right where the sun sort of dips below the horizon, you see this sort of column, triangular column of light. Yeah, and it happens that the ecliptic is like at 90 degrees to your horizon, it's going to be straight up and down. If the ecliptic is slanted because, you know, it's a different time of the year, then it's going to be slanted along the ecliptic. Really? Yeah, sort of points the direction that the planets will appear on.

Well, yeah, because I guess if you're in the equator, then you're looking at the sunrise and sunset pretty close to the plane of the solar system, right? But if you're maybe closer to the North Pole, it's going to be kind of tilted, right? Yeah, and it also depends on the season, right? Because the Earth tilt relative to the plane depends on sort of where we are in our orbit around the sun. And so the ecliptic tilts more, for example, in the winter and summer than it does in the spring and fall. If you're in the northern hemisphere, but if you're in the southern hemisphere, it's the opposite. Exactly. So what this thing looks like depends on the time of year. And that makes it sort of easier and harder to see at different times of year. When it's slanted over really, really far, it's harder to notice because it doesn't rise as high above the horizon. So it's easiest to notice when it's sort of like the sharpest angle with the horizon because then it rises further above the horizon and you can more easily spot it.

Well, I hope people at Google search this and look up images of it because it's pretty interesting. But one important clue about it is that it doesn't come from the earth. Like when you look at the sunset or sunrise and you see the beautiful red sky and the beautiful sort of cloud patterns, that's all stuff that's happening on Earth in our atmosphere, right? The red shift of the light. But the effect, the zodical light, is actually happening outside of Earth, right? In space. Yeah, it's really cool because as you say, it's not something caused by.

our atmosphere. You know, sunsets and sunlights are red because our atmosphere tends to scatter the blue light. And so during sunrise and sunset, it's that red light that's getting to you, getting to your eyes. So that's an effect of our atmosphere. And even the northern lights and the southern lights are effects of our atmosphere. They are the solar wind and cosmic radiation raining down on our atmosphere and glowing here on Earth. But the zodiacal light is something else. It's something different. It comes from outer space, as you say. It's something that you could see even on a planet with no atmosphere. It's out of this world.

It's alien. It's extraterrestrial for sure. Are you saying the zodiac are aliens, Daniel? Boy, this is going to be a popular episode. But I guess what you mean is like if you're out in space, you're not going to see the northern lights and you're not going to see a red sunset, but you might see this zordical light. Yeah, yeah, you definitely should. All right, well, let's get into what causes this interesting and mysterious effect.

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Brought to you by opportunity at work in the ad council. All right, Daniel, we are reading the signs of the universe. We are aligning the planet and we are looking at zordical light, which is an interesting and maybe mysterious effect that you can see out in space coming off of the sun. Yeah, it's really cool because it's something that you can see with your naked eyes, right? You don't need any equipment. You just have to be sort of in the right time or the right place. And you can see this weird space glow.

And the cool thing is that it doesn't come from our atmosphere, as you say, it's a property of the solar system itself. All right. So I assume by now, people during the break went and Google searched Zodical Light and looked up cool images of it. And so now we know that it doesn't come from our atmosphere. It comes out from something in space. And so step us through this. What is causing this mysterious light pattern?

Well, it's caused by the dirt and the dust that's in the solar system. When you think of the solar system, of course, you imagine the sun and the planets and all their moons. But really, the solar system is not that crisp and clean and empty. It's actually filled with all sorts of stuff. Of course, there's radiation from the sun shooting out particles, protons, and electrons, and gamma rays, et cetera, et cetera. But also, the solar system is not so neat and clean. There's huge dust clouds everywhere. And that dust is what we are seeing.

We are seeing the sun reflect off of the dust that's in the plane of the solar system. Whoa. Wait, wait, wait. So our solar system is dirty? Is that what you're saying? It's dusty? Is it like dust left over from when the solar system formed? Or is it dust from like asteroids crashing?

You know, where does this dust come from? Well, there's a long debate about the origin of the dust. And it's not something we still fully understand. Scientists are still trying to figure it out. And one of the mysteries is that we're pretty sure it can't be dust left over from the formation of the solar system. Because all that stuff got cleaned up and slurped up into larger objects billions and billions of years ago. All of our models of formations of solar systems have this like collapse into a sun and a protoplanes. planetary disk, which then forms planets, but it's pretty efficient at gathering up little bits

of old stars and dust and everything else that forms planets and meteors and asteroids and all that stuff. So when that's done, you really shouldn't have much dust left over. You know, that dust either should fall into the star or it should get captured by other objects. Right. Like a planet acts like a giant vacuum in the vacuum of space, right? Like if you have a giant rock flowing by, you're going to be gravitationally attracted to it. Yeah. The whole process, of solar system formation is taking a big cloud of gas and dust and collapsing it into bigger objects. And once gravity gets that started, it's pretty effective. You have a big mass, it's going to slurp stuff together. And so we're pretty sure that the fact that we still have

dust means there needs to be a new source. It needs to be replenished. It's like when you built your house, it was clean, right? Didn't have any dust in it. Ten years later, if it has dust in it, you know it's not from the original builders, right? There's some new source of dust making your house dusty. Wow. Well, all right, we'll get into the origin, potential origin of this dust later. It's kind of an interesting mystery, but I guess maybe explain to us how this, this dust forms this interesting light pattern. Yeah, well, these dust are like tiny little rocks. You know, they're like one to 300 microns. These are really small, tiny little particles, and they're flying out there in space. And like most things in the solar system, they don't glow, right?

They're not like on fire. They're not tiny little stars that are shooting off photons. Instead, reflective. You know, these things are like either frozen drops of hydrogen or they have silica in them or something else, but they're reflective. And so just like the Earth or the moon or the other planets, the Sun's light reflects off of this dust. And so you can imagine what happens is that a beam of light is shooting out of the sun and it hits this dust and it reflects just at the right angle to come to Earth. Of course, it reflects all sorts of crazy angles. So if you were above the solar system, you could also see this dust glowing. But some of it will reflect right down onto Earth. And that's what we see is the zodiacal light. Oh, I see. So it's sort of like sand

almost. Like there's just a cloud of sand out there, like covering the dish of the solar system, right? It's not like above the dish or below the dish. It's like it's gathering kind of like a frisbee around the solar system. Yeah, exactly. It's in a disk like everything else on the solar system. And that's because it's rotating with everything else in the solar system. You know, you might wonder like, why does the solar system have this weird disc pattern? And that's because it's rotating. And the reason that the Earth does not collapse into the sun is because it's moving really, really fast around the sun.

It has this angular momentum that keeps it from collapsing into the sun. That only happens on the plane of this rotation of the original mass of stuff. In the other direction, like sort of above and below this disk, there's no rotation, and so it's free to collapse. So that's why the solar system ends up as a disk and not like a sphere, because it can collapse

sort of in the up and down direction along the sun's axis. but it can't collapse in the plane around the sun. And so like everything else, the disc is sort of trapped by this rotation. But, you know, like it slows down and it falls into the sun and like the earth might eventually. I see.

So it's sort of like this giant disk cloud of sand and little tiny rocks, and it's glowing your same because it's basically reflecting light from the sun. Like the sun shoots out light and it hits this sand cloud, this dust cloud, and then it makes it glow. And we see it.

And that's kind of why, we see it as like a column in the sky because there's no dust above or below or, you know, not in the plane of the solar system. That's right. And you might be confused like why does dust glow? Dust doesn't seem like it glows. And if you look at sand doesn't seem like a mirror, right? But sand and dust are visible in sunlight, right? The reason you can see a beach, the reason it's not like invisible or transparent is because it is reflecting sunlight. You know, the sun hits the sand and then comes to your eye. And that's why you see it. If sand didn't reflect light, if it just absorbed all the light, it would be jet black, right? I guess it'd be like a black sand beach.

So it's, you know, it doesn't sound like a property of dust or sand to be reflective. But of course, they do reflect some light. And that's what you see. Or if you ever seen like moats of dust floating, you know, in a sunbeam, then you're seeing them because they reflect light. And so that's what's happening. And the reason we see it in the sky is sort of fuzzy is because it's not like a crisply defined object with like sharp edges like a planet. It's just this big cloud of dust that nobody swept up. Right. I guess it's kind of like maybe like in a foggy night or in like a sort of like dewy kind of humid night. You see sort of a glow around street lamps, right? That's kind of what it is. The glow around street lamps is just the light from the lamp kind of hitting the water or

air dust particles around it. And so you see this kind of halo around street lamps, right? Exactly. And in principle, you could see it during the day, you know, because this is. a huge clouds of it extending on either directions sort of along the path of the sun, but during the day it's too bright, right? You just can't see it. It's outshined by everything else. For the same reason you can't see stars during the day. They're up there. They're sending you photons. You're getting them. You just don't notice it because you have this basically flashlight right in your eyes of the sun. But the reason you can see it just after the sun dips over the horizon is that now the sky is dark enough and the angle is just right for this part of the

disc that's sort of just over the horizon to get the sun's rays and then bounce right back to your eyes. I see. You were saying you were comparing it to the Milky Way a little bit because the Milky Way is also sort of in a disk and we're on that disc. And so when you look at the night sky and you're able to see the Milky Way, you see it as a streak across the sky. But that's only, I guess, because the Milky Way itself glows, right?

It's made out of stars. And so you see it as a streak. But this one, it needs to catch the light of the sun in a certain way. Yeah, exactly. The Milky Way is visible because, as you say, these are the stars. their own stars that have their own careers and they glow brightly on their own. And it's a different line, right? The plane of the Milky Way is not aligned with the plane of the solar system. So the Milky Way and the zodiacal light don't have to line up. And the Milky Way is best seen deep, deep into the

night when we're in the earth's shadow and you can't see the sun at all because it glows on its own. The zodiacal light, as you say, has to reflect the light of the sun. And so if the sun is on the other side of the earth, it's like midnight or something or deep in the morning, then you're not going to be able to see any of this. Actually, you can see a little bit sometimes. You can see a little bit of it that reflects back from the other direction. Yeah, because we are in the middle of the disk, so you should see the outer edge of the disk too, right? Yeah, if the sun is right behind us, like right in the middle of the night, it can just hit some of this dust, and it can reflect back at just the right angle to our eyes. So this is other thing in the middle

of the night called the Gagenshine, which is a German word for countergloh that are probably mispronounced. And it's at the anti-solar point, anti-solar point being like the opposite direction of the sun. So you draw a line from the sun to your head, and it's sort of through that line in the other direction. It's like in the shadow of the earth, right? Yeah, and this is very hard to see. It's very faint. But in just the right conditions, you can see this sort of glowy spot in the middle of the sky in the deep night. And that's this counterglow.

That's the light passing over the earth from the sun. and then hitting the dust and coming back to your eyes. So it's sort of like illuminating a different part of this disk of dust that's out there. Right. Would you then see it as like a streak across the sky? You would, right? And it wouldn't just be a spot. If you could illuminate the whole disc and get back to your eye,

you would see it as a streak. But it's sort of like a fuzzy spot because I think the shortest angles and the brightest part of it is the parts that's directly illuminated because it's brightest when it directly backscatters. Like when the light hits the dust and you get like, like the full reflection. Interesting. And so that effect, you can also see maybe with your naked eye in the middle of the night.

Yeah, and this is something I've never seen, but now I want to. So next time I happen to be up at 3 a.m., I'm going to go outside and look for the gig and shine. Yeah, but I guess you live in a major city, or at least near a major city, so that might be pretty hard. Yeah, I think it probably will be. Well, next time I go camping. And you're up at 3 a.m. sleeping in your satellite mattress. That's right.

And it's sort of incredible that what you're seeing are these tiny little things. Like they are one to 300 microns. Like imagine if I told you like, hey, there's something 300 microns in size, floating out near Mars. Go look up at the night sky and see if you can see it. You know, that sounds ridiculous, right? You couldn't even see like a boulder between here, Mars. You couldn't, like, if somebody put the Empire State Building near Mars, you'd have no chance of seeing it. But you get enough dust together and you get those photons that add up.

you really can come to your eyes and you really can see it. Right. They sort of add up not just because there's a lot, but because there's a lot of space between here and Mars, right, and here in the sun. And so even though it's mostly clear, all those little bits of dust and sand add up. Yeah, and it's a lot of space.

And so even though we say like there's dust everywhere, it's not actually that dense. Like the average distance between these dust particles is like five miles, you know, like eight kilometers. Wait, the average distance between, like little grains of sand in space? Yes. Five miles.

Yeah, exactly. If you went on a tour, like a, you know, pub crawl from dust moat to dust moat, it would take a while to get from one to the other. I imagine it would be hard to find this well. Like, how do you find one grain of sand in a five miles sphere of space? Yeah, and also they're moving pretty fast.

These things are moving at like tens of kilometers per second, which is one reason why it's been a challenge to study these things because it's hard to collect them. You know, they're moving very, very fast and they're sort of sparse. Well, as you said before, this kind of dust in the solar system wasn't always here, and it shouldn't be here if the solar system was just left with its own devices, right? Like the solar system, in a way, sort of like self-cleaning. Like if there was any dust, it would all either fall into a planet or into an asteroid or into the sun.

So we should have a pretty clean solar system, but we don't. We have all this dust. Yeah, gravity does a pretty good job of tidying up. You just leave things around and they should just clump together and eventually form a black hole of all of your garbage. Try that at home, folks. That seems to happen in my house anyway because I'm the only one who takes out the trash and sometimes I put that off. But yeah, so it's kind of a big mystery then where all this dust is coming from because the solar system shouldn't have any dust. Yeah, exactly.

It's an area of research right now. Like people are doing studies and building models and trying to understand where this comes from. And it's something that people have been working on for, you know, 50, 60 years. It was first discovered in the 70s when people sent balloons up to the upper atmosphere to gather some of this cosmic dust that was falling to the Earth. And that was pretty cool to discover. Wait, so I guess we had seen this light effect for a long time, probably a very long time, I imagine, right? And so we didn't know what it was until the 70s. It wasn't until the 70s people started sort of asking what this was.

Yeah, there were ideas that space dust should exist or that should be absolutely. there but people weren't sure about how much dust there was like is it all interstellar dust is it really all cleared out in the solar system and it wasn't until the 70s that we started to sample the stuff and really measure like how much cosmic dust is there you know they sent up these balloon experiments and then later really high flying airplanes to try to gather cosmic dust and you can tell the difference between dust that comes from the solar system and dust that comes from outside the solar system and things that are just like you know dust storms from earth because they all

have a different makeup. Wait, so I can put up a balloon that goes out into near-Earth orbit and I can catch some of this space dust? Yeah, because tons of it falls to Earth, right? We say that there's just a grain every five miles or so, but there's a lot of it. And so some of it falls to Earth every day. It's like tons of it is falling onto the Earth's surface. So we can gather it up and we can study it. Wow, like a little vacuum, like put out a vacuum cleaner out there in space. Well, that's the process, right? Like we're talking about how the solar system cleans itself up. That's how it happens. The Sun pulls some of it in, Earth pulls some of it in. Everybody pitches in and cleans this stuff up.

We're flying through this cloud of dust and the earth is gathering it as we go. That is definitely not how my household works. I wish everyone pitched in. Tell your kids, they just have to run through the house and they'll just like gather all the dirt on them. Yeah, there are you. It's part of their star chores for their star allowance. All right, well, let's get into the origin of this dust, what it could be made out of and where it could be coming from out there in space. and what we're doing to study it.

But first, let's take another quick break. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, and in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls, I sit down with Dr. Ophia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right, in terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media,

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or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so the solar system apparently is pretty dusty. It's not clean and Christine as we thought. thought it was, but it's not the solar system's fault. Like, the solar system is trying to keep a tidy home here, but dust keeps raining down on it and accumulating and forming this disk around in the solar system that causes interesting light effects. That's right.

And people have been trying to figure out, like, where does this dust come from? If the solar system is constantly cleaning itself up, then what's the source of dust? And for a long time, people had a couple sort of obvious explanations. They were like, well, what makes a mess in the solar system? You know, what contributes to making new stuff or breaking stuff up? And so one culprit are asteroids. Asteroids that like bang into each other because we have this big collection of rocks out there between Mars and Jupiter and it's a huge number.

And sometimes they hit each other and they break up and that causes debris. And so people thought, well, you know, that must make a mess. You know, it's like when your kids are cooking, you know, this spray stuff everywhere. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, because I guess, you know, the solar system is trying to clean the time. but maybe whenever to asteroids crash, they just create a big dust of basically rock, or little rocks, right? And so maybe that's polluting the solar system.

That definitely is part of it. And another culprit are comets. Remember, we have these objects out there in the Oort Cloud, these frozen balls, probably trillions of them really far out, thousands and thousands of AU out there. It's really sort of incredible. Those of you interested in that kind of stuff, check out our whole podcast episode about the Oort Cloud. Really amazing stuff. But what happens? happens when comets come through the solar system, they zoom down towards the sun and the sun blows a lot of stuff off of them, right? Why do comets have tails? Not because they literally have tails, but because the sun is boiling them away and stuff is leaving the comet. And so

you can literally see it leaving dust in a trail across the sky. That's what the comet's tail is. So that was another potential contribution to, you know, the mysterious source of the space dust. If it was comets, wouldn't those little grains of dust be made out of water then? Yeah, some of them are, right? Some of the space dust does come from water. And as you say, the more we can study this space dust, the more we can figure out, like, who's contributing it?

Because asteroids and commons are made out of very different things. So those are two potential sources for this mysterious dust. But one other clue we know about it is that it's sort of slowly falling into the solar system, right? Like it doesn't seem to be kind of like made here, maybe. It seems to be sort of moving and spiraling. Yeah, it's definitely spiraling in towards the sun. And if you look at a map for like where it is, it's densest nearest the sun, right? So the sun pulls this stuff in.

And you might wonder like, well, why doesn't the dust itself just orbit the way the Earth does? Like the Earth may be very slowly falling in towards the sun, but its orbit is not decaying that rapidly. And the reason is that these things do absorb a good amount of light. And then they radiate that light off and that slows them down. So they're like absorbing some of this energy and shooting it back off. So that tends to slow them down. And so mostly it's dense near the sun. And then it drops off, extends out just past Mars.

And past that, there's really not very much space dust. Oh, interesting. So it's not coming from outside the solar system, maybe? Is that kind of sort of what you would draw from that? Since it's only sort of in the inner solar system? Yeah, it's mostly in the inner solar system. The truth is we don't really know what's going on in the outer solar system because we don't have great detectors.

Like these things are hard to measure. And as you get further out, it's less and less. dense, which means it's harder and harder to find them. So we actually have very little data for the outer solar system. But it seems like it drops in density, it ends around Mars, and then there's basically nothing before Jupiter. Jupiter is like a giant vacuum cleaner, though it sucks up everything. But also, we do think that a little bit of it probably does come from outside the solar system, these interstellar star grains, these leftover bits from the surfaces of stars that formed and are floating out there. Some of those do appear in our solar system as space.

dust, but it's probably not a huge contribution, though it's super fascinating, actually, because you can tell the stage of the star's life when the grains were formed because of the materials fusing inside of them. Yeah, absolutely. And you can like see grains that were made specifically during supernova, like these specific chemicals, these specific elements that can only be fused during supernova. And they make these specific grains, which you can find on Earth and use them to do studies. It's really kind of amazing. sort of stellar archaeology you can do by looking at these interstellar grains. But for space dust, that's like a tiny fraction of what's out there.

Interesting. So then the origin of this dust must be within our solar system then. It seems like it's within our solar system. And so, you know, one culprit, of course, is the asteroids. And the asteroids are out there sort of past Mars. And so that doesn't really fit, right? Because the space dust is densest near the sun and it sort of dies out just around Mars. And if it was being generated in the asteroid belt,

is between Mars and Jupiter, you would expect a lot more of it to be out there. But it gets cleaner and cleaner as you get closer to the asteroid belt. Couldn't it originate in the asteroid belt and then fall into the inner solar system? And that's why you would see, you sort of see it, you know, not there and more here. But that would have a different distribution. You would definitely see more of it in the asteroid belt before it falls in, right? But we see almost none of it there. So they have some ways to study these things.

They have some detectors that they send up. Like basically every probe that we send end to the solar system has a dust detector on it. But these things are pretty small. Like the New Horizons probe had a dust detector on it. But it was like an eighth of a meter squared, which is pretty small. And these things are pretty hard to catch because they're moving so fast. So our studies of these things have been pretty limited until we accidentally invented an awesome space dust detector. We accidentally invented it?

We accidentally invented it. Yeah. We built this other probe called Juno to go to. discover Jupiter. And it has on it these incredibly huge solar panels. These solar panels are like 60 square meters of solar arrays to power this thing. And on it, they also have cameras. And these cameras are on the spacecraft so they can like take pictures of the stars and, you know, orient themselves for navigation and basically tell the spacecraft where it is and they're constantly taking pictures. Well, one scientist from Denmark was like, you know, we can do something else with these.

we can also try to catch pictures of asteroids as we fly around the solar system to see if maybe there are any asteroids we missed. So he programmed this camera, not just to do the navigation, but to let him know if it spotted any new objects, any unknown objects in the solar system, because he thought,

hey, it'd be cool to discover a couple new asteroids along the way. Interesting. Like, how was he or she expecting to find these asteroids, like, you know, like a photo bomb almost? Like if you're looking out into space and it's like, hey, wait a minute, that little pinpoint they're glowing, we don't see it from Earth. So it must be like an asteroid flying by.

Yeah, so it has these cameras and he programmed it to look for any glint of light that corresponds to an object that's not in the databases. Because that's how you see asteroids, right? The moment they happen to reflect light off the sun at just the right angle. So they have a catalog of the known asteroids and they know where the thing is pointing so they can tell what they should be able to see, you know, stars and visible asteroids. And so any new source there is something interesting. And so he programmed this thing. you thought, I'll probably not find anything. And then it started flying through the solar system and his camera went crazy. There was like crazy numbers of images. He's like thousands and thousands

of new things that nobody had seen before. Wait, what? So they took these pictures while it was flying to Jupiter and it turns out that there is a lot more than that is not in the database. They saw a lot of streaks in there that they couldn't identify as things in the database. And at first they thought, oh, something is wrong with the spacecraft. It's like leaking fuel or something we're like, you know, seeing the death of our spacecraft. They couldn't believe that these things were like actually real objects out there in the solar system. And so they were really wondering what these things were. Like, what is going on here?

And it turned out that what's happening is that it's space dust. You're not seeing the space dust itself because these particles are really small and very fast moving. But the space dust was slamming into their huge solar panels in the back and then like chipping off a little piece that was then bouncing back and they were seeing that. So they're seeing like space dust ricocheting little bits off of their space probe. Wait, what? So wait, they weren't seeing the actual dust. They were seeing the dust bouncing off of the solar panel? What's the difference?

They're seeing shrapnel from the solar panel. So like, you know, it's like you shoot a space dust at this thing and it knocks off a tiny little bit of the solar panel and then that's what you see. Really? Whoa. Well, first of all, that's kind of bad news, isn't it? It means your solar panel is going to disintegrate. eventually. But why is the shrapnel more visible than the actual dust? Yeah, that's a good question. I think the shrapnel itself is larger and probably more

reflective. I see. Like the actual dust you can't see, but you can't see these little chips of solar panel. Yeah, and also the dust is moving really, really fast, and the shrapnel is probably moving more slowly, so it's easier to capture it in a camera frame. Wow. So we inadvertently created a dust detector slash deteriorating solar panel. Yeah. So this effectively became the largest space dust detector ever by a factor of a thousand, right? There are dedicated dust detectors that have been flown out through the solar system, but they're a thousand times smaller than the solar panels of Juno, which in effect turned out to be pretty sensitive to space dust. But only because we sort of put cameras by accident

looking at the solar panels or not. Are they looking at the panels or sort of looking behind the panels? Well, they're sort of looking in all directions, but some of the ones that are pointing like behind the panels are the ones that can capture these little shrapnel when it's space dust hits the satellite's solar panels, the backside of them, which fortunately the backside of them is the side that's pointed away from the sun, and so it's picking up the space dust as it flies out of the solar system and are also much more protected. The front side, the side that's sensitive, that's pointed towards the sun, is much more delicate.

That sounds a little dangerous. Like, why if I was out there flying through space, wouldn't I sort of be pelted by these things and then wouldn't they also turn me into shrapnel? Yeah, space is dangerous. dangerous. And if you're flying at very high speeds through space, you need to worry about little particles and micrometeorites and space dust. These grains carry a lot of kinetic energy if you're moving at high speed. So yeah, absolutely. Be careful next time you take that trip. Although I guess if I can fly through space, it must be pretty indestructible like Superman. But this is a great

source of data. They captured more than 15,000 of these collisions, which lets them make a really detailed measurement of the density of dust in the inner solar system, much more detailed than anything we had before. And it told us the story, which was a little bit of a surprise. What did we learn? Well, we knew that the dust was dropping in density, but now we have much more detail that it ends like sort of just after Mars. There's basically no dust after Mars. You know, until you get to Jupiter, past Jupiter, there's some dust, but Jupiter like basically cleans up everything else. But there's no dust basically between Mars and Jupiter, which sort of rules out the asteroid belt as a large source of this dust.

interesting because there is no dust close to the asteroid belt like you said yeah exactly it sort of ends after mars so then people thought well hmm well what else could it be and it starts kind of around mars and so they thought mars is kind of dusty what if it's coming from mars what hmm but wouldn't mars suck in dust just like the earth mars does suck in some dust but you know it's much smaller than earth and so it doesn't have as powerful gravity and what it does have are powerful dust storms. So they don't yet have an understanding for like how the dust is leaving Mars, but it has a weaker atmosphere and weaker gravity and powerful dust storms. And so they suspect that Mars might be the source of this dust. That little grains of stuff are leaving Mars and basically

polluting our solar system. Whoa, whoa, wait, wait. So a storm on Mars is powerful enough to like throw things out into space, like to have it with enough velocity to have, you know, escape velocity because that doesn't happen on earth right like the earth doesn't spew stuff out into space does it well the earth sort of does spew stuff out into space like our atmosphere we're constantly losing it out into space the upper edge of the atmosphere the hottest molecules are definitely flying out or we're losing our atmosphere gradually and also some of that are going to be dust particles that are floating up there in the upper atmosphere but we have stronger gravity which makes it easier for us to hang on to our atmosphere but this is a part of the theory that's sort of still speculative they don't have a very

solid model for how the dust gets off of Mars. They just have this sort of coincidental evidence that it seems to start around Mars, you know, and so it's sort of like, your son was in the kitchen, and then it was a big mess, and you're like, hmm. Mars is suss. Are you saying Mars is

sus? Exactly. Exactly. It is red. Interesting. But it sounds like we have some candidates, so it could be comets. It could still be asteroids, but maybe not so much, but now people are suspecting Mars. Yeah. And so, So it's an active area of research, and this is like a new element, new something else to throw into the mix.

Probably the answer is a little bit of all of them. There's going to be some interstellar dust, some comet tails, some asteroid debris, and maybe some of Mars being a slob. And it couldn't be anything else, could it? Could it be Earth also being a little messy, or maybe some of the other planets? It could be, but, you know, it sort of starts out there near Mars, but it could be that all the planets do contribute a little bit. Interesting. And so this is an active area of research, but it's. It's not a super popular area, right?

Yeah, it's really hard to study. And there's not a lot of money for space dust. And these detectors that they put on these probes are sort of small, like the one that was on New Horizons, was built by students, sort of low budget experiment. Really awesome, but not like the hottest topic and sort of slow moving progress. So slow moving that one famous scientist took a 37-year break from his PhD thesis and was able to come back and finish it and have it still be relevant. And nobody had done anything in the meantime.

What could this person have possibly been doing for 37 years? So this is Brian May, who was an astrophysics PhD student in 1971, when the little band he was in called Queen started to really take off, and he decided, hmm, maybe academia is not for me. And so he went off and had a great career with Queen doing rock and roll, et cetera. And then in 2007, he thought, I never finished that PhD. I bet that would be fun to wrap up. And so he went back and they let him finish it.

and he defended his Ph.D. Yeah. Does he hold the record for like the longest PhD ever for at least the most, you know, a rock star thesis? I think he does hold the record for the most number one hits of anyone with a Ph.D. But his Ph.D. was on the zodiacal dust cloud. And so what he was measuring was the velocity of these particles. Yeah, I guess maybe running a proposal to study dust doesn't make anyone too excited in the funding agencies.

Yeah, it got him excited. I mean, remember that any time we learn something in science, it's because, Somebody has dedicated their life and their career to that topic. When you're learning about, like, you know, the mating rituals of Prey Mantai, that's because somebody has devoted their life to it. And so everything we learn requires some expert in that area. And, you know, Brian May decided that zodiacal dust was going to be his career. Then again, he also abandoned it to become the electric guitarist for Queen.

But he came back, right? Like, he abandoned being a rock star to go into science. So, you know, he came back is what's important. Well, you didn't exactly come back when Queen was at its heyday or anything, but yeah, it stayed number two on his list for a long time. Well, I guess, you know, again, it might, you know, the origin of this dust. And even though it's just does, it might tell us a lot about sort of like how the solar system works and maybe how storms and Mars work and also kind of about the origins of the solar

system, right? And it just gives us sort of a fuller picture of what's going on. We had sort of a simplistic model for the solar system of mostly being the sun and a few planets. Now we know there's a lot more going on out there. There's the orc cloud with these trillions of icy objects and there's space dust and space weather and space wind. And it's really quite a vibrant and full system out there. There's lots of crazy stuff going on. Yeah, yeah. It's a pretty interesting universe, uh, solar system. I think it might be a Gemina, the solar system, which would explain everything, man. Do the constellations have their own zodiac

signs? Like, it's the Gemini constellation in Aries or something? Sounds like another long PhD thesis to delve into. That'll take 37 years for sure. But yeah, so the next time you look at a sunrise or sunset, keep an eye out for this zodical light, right? You might see it with your naked eye, and you might be looking at a giant mystery that even physicists and rock stars are pondering about.

And if you do happen to spot it, or if you see this Gagenshine, you are looking at tiny little grains of dust far, far out into space, beaming back their photons to you. Because in the universe, I guess, little things add up. That's right. We have crowdsourced. We have dust sourced a little bit of photons.

Give them a little bit of chore to each one and they'll get it done. Pretty soon they're going to unionize. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. Thanks for listening. And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeart Radio.

For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast.

Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to, choose an adaptive strategy, which is more effortful to use, unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people, an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show. and we had a blast. Take a listen.

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