Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What's in the asteroid belt?

Episode Date: October 29, 2019

What do we know about the asteroid belt and what can we learn from it? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship. I'm Emily Tish Sussman, and on she pivots, I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps in their lives and careers. I'm Gretchen Whitmer, Jody Sweetie. Monica Patton, Elaine Welteroth. Learn how to get comfortable pivoting because your life is going to be full of them. Listen to these women and more on She Pivots. Now on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if we've been looking for life in all the wrong places?

Sure, we're searching for signs of life on Mars, and we're hunting down planets around other stars and far away solar systems, hoping to find one with an atmosphere, sphere, and maybe even signs of life. But what if life could be out there, but not on a planet, not even on a moon? What if life could be out there, but hiding in something much smaller? Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, a sometimes author, and a twice a week podcast host, and you are listening to the podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, brought to you. Heart Radio. My usual co-host, Jorge, isn't here still this week. He'll be away for a little while, but don't worry, folks. He'll be coming back soon. Our podcast is dedicated to zooming around the

universe, exploring everything that's weird, that's amazing, that's crazy, that blows your mind that maybe you hear scientists talking about but never really understood until today, until we break it down for you. So the goal of our podcast is to share with you the amazing, crazy bonkers universe that we live in without blowing your mind too much, we want to download that information into your brain so that you really get it. So you can appreciate just like scientists on the cutting edge of knowledge how amazing and crazy this universe is. And a lot of times on this podcast, we go far away and talk about the center of the galaxy or other galaxies or the structure of the whole universe, or we zoom down to tiny little particles and talk about how amazing and weird they are and

the strange rules that govern life of the quantum realm. But there are missing. We have talked, for example, about the mysteries of lightning and how to skip stones, and also about weird things going on in our solar system. And that is the focus of today's episode. We want to understand the weird stuff that's in our neighborhood. We want to make sure that when we look over our shoulder, we understand what's going on. Because people think, oh, our solar system, we've been exploring it for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Surely we understand what there is to know there.

Surely we have a grasp on everything that's going on in the solar system. Well, not true. And some of those amazing mysteries are hiding in a place you probably don't even think about. If I tell you to imagine the solar system, you probably think of the sun, first off, it's the biggest, baddest object in the solar system. And then, of course, the planets zooming around it, with the star being our blue globe that we call home. But there's something else there. There's another big piece of the solar system that takes up a huge chunk. It's an important element, but it's not a dense object like planets.

in the sun. It's the asteroid belt. The asteroid belt is this weird collection of rocks between Mars and Jupiter. And it turns out there's a lot of things we don't understand about it. Starting off with, why is there an asteroid belt? It goes, planet, planet, planet, planet, planet, asteroid belt, planet, planet, planet, planet. Anything that's weird in science, anything that sticks out, that's a clue. That's going to show you the path to an answer. It's going to reveal something about why it looks that way and not some other way. So every time we find a pattern that doesn't quite fit, we ask why. And hopefully, those answers lead to mind-blowing discoveries and probably more questions.

But it's not just the fact of the asteroid belt that's weird. It's what's inside it. So the question we'll be answering today is, What's going on with the asteroid belt? And I have to share with you that learning about the asteroid belt, I had a personal, oh my God, is it aliens moment when one of these strange, bizarre, crazy features of the asteroid belt was first discovered. We'll talk about that soon. But first, I was wondering, what do people know about the asteroid belt?

Do people out there even know what's in the asteroid belt and why it's interesting? Does everybody know that there is an asteroid belt? So as usual, to sort of get a sense for how much people know and what their questions are, I walked around campus at UC Irvine, and I asked people, hey, what do you think is in the asteroid belt? People thought that was a weird question, but as usual, they were game. So thank you again to the students at UC Irvine for answering a weirdos, weird questions. Here's what they had to say, but before you answer, think to yourself. Do you know what's in the asteroid belt?

How accurately could you describe it? Here the answers from students at UC Irvine. for the most part it's just rocks and then now it's debris because you know space junk and all that and then it's accumulating so it can be i believe a combination of things of sizes at least from larger to smaller tiny rocks like the moon like size of the moon yeah maybe the size of the moon bigger i don't know combination of sand and some other chemicals i would say they're pretty big rocks but there's a lot of diversity there i'm under the impression that it's a lot of rocks and maybe a couple of, like, icy stuff in there, too. They could be as big as a moon and as big as the Earth. It just depends, like, where you are. I would say it varies a lot, like, maybe somewhere from, like, the car to maybe, like, a small moon or something.

So, of course, the most popular answer is asteroids. That makes sense. You wouldn't call it the asteroid belt if it didn't have asteroids in it. But what are asteroids? And, of course, you heard a lot of people say rocks. Big rocks, small rocks, really little rocks. Some people even thought that there were rocks in there, the size of the moon. So there's a big variety of reactions out there to what's in the asteroid belt.

So that makes me feel like, yeah, let's dig into it. Let's make sure everybody out there knows what the asteroid belt is, what we know about it, what we don't know about it, and what amazing potential alien discoveries it might be hiding. All right. So first of all, where is the asteroid belt? The asteroid belt is between Mars and Jupiter, right? So we got four inner planets, and then we got this big swath of rocks or asteroids, and then we got the outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn, and the Neptune and Uranus, of course.

So it sort of divides the solar system, right? You have these inner rocky planets, and then the asteroid belt, and then you got the big gas planets on the outside. And that seems like a clue, right? So let's dig in a little bit. what is in the asteroid belt? Well, it's not just asteroids, right? Asteroids means a lot of things. And the asteroid belt was discovered actually in the 1800s because some of these asteroids in the belt are big, like they are really big. In fact, the asteroid belt doesn't just have asteroids

in it. It also has dwarf planets, planets that are as big as Pluto, not quite the size of our moon, right? But these are big rocks. And remember, the way we see these things in the sky. is we can't see them glow directly. They don't give off light the way the sun does. We can only see them when the sun's light shines on them and then bounces back to Earth, the same way we see our own moon, which also doesn't actually glow in the sky. It's just a reflection of the light from the sun. So any of these objects, for us to see them, they have to be shiny and they have to be big, because that's the only way we can see this stuff. So, of course, in the 1800s, the first thing we found were the biggest ones. That's back before we had amazing space telescopes to track all

these things down. And there are four objects in the asteroid belt that take up a whopping half of the mass. That's right. You add up all the rocks and sand and dust and ice and all that stuff in the asteroid belt and weigh it. Half of it is in just four objects. These are the first four scene. Those are series, which is a little dwarf planet, Vesta, Palace, and Hygieia. Again, I don't know who's in charge of naming these objects. I'm not even sure how to officially do pronounce them. But I think it's sort of awesome that they're out there. They're sort of dominating the asteroid belt.

So it's mostly these big four asteroids. And then in the late 1800s, people were looking more and more, and they saw smaller rocks. But it drops off pretty fast. And so it took until about 1868 before people had seen 100 of these things. And then in the early 1900s, they had seen 1,000. and then by 1981, we had found 10,000 individual objects in the asteroid belt. And now we have more than 100,000 individual objects categorized.

We know where they're going. We know how fast they're spinning. We know their orbit. They each probably have names. Though those names, of course, are probably not very creative. If you have to name 100,000 objects in the solar system, you probably come up with a scheme, and they probably have really boring names like letters and numbers.

So most of the mass isn't just four of these objects, right? And those are really sort of like mini planets. You can't really even call those asteroids. But, you know, a lot of this is just terminology. What do you call a planet? What do you call a dwarf planet? What do you call an asteroid? This is just sort of arbitrary stuff that we made up.

Like a whole controversy about whether Pluto is a planet or a dwarf planet. It comes down to semantics. It's not like there's a clear difference between one object and the other. People just have to draw a line somewhere. And then you say, well, on this side of the line, you're a planet over here. You're a dwarf planet. It doesn't really necessarily mean anything. So sometimes I feel like the whole controversy about whether Pluto is a planet or not is a bit overblown.

It's there. We know what it is. It's a thing. You know, it's part of our family. Do we have to be so worried about labels? Anyway, even if you add up all the stuff in the asteroid belt, all the rocks and dust and ice and all of that stuff that's there, it's only 4% of the mass of the moon. That's right. The moon is more than 25 times more massive than all the stuff in the asteroid belt put together. And that tells you two things. One, we've got a big moon. It's the truth. Like, of all the moons in the solar system, Earth is odd for having such a big moon.

Also, it tells you that the asteroid belt is not that big, right? There's not that much stuff in it. You probably imagine the asteroid belt is like space totally dotted with rocks and like that scene in Star Wars. where the Millennium Falcon is trying to navigate its way at high speed through those rocks and just barely whizzing by and almost crashing, that's not the experience we have when we send probes through the asteroid belt, because the asteroid belt is not that dense. Remember, space is big, like really, really big. If you're going to fly out into the solar system, you're very unlikely to hit a planet, right? Because even though planets are big, they're not big compared to the solar system. In the same way, the asteroid belt,

Even though it's distributed across lots of little rocks, it still doesn't fill up space. It doesn't even come close to filling up space. We have sent lots of probes to the outer part of the solar system and never even worried about having them hit an asteroid. It's difficult, in fact, to hit an asteroid. The Japanese recently sent up an awesome probe to land on an asteroid and punch it to see what it's made out of and understand, you know, is it made out of carbon or silicon or ice or whatever, and that was hard, right? So it's not easy to run into an asteroid. If you want to fly your spaceship through the asteroid belt, most likely you'll never even see one.

And if you just watch these things, they don't even bounce into each other very often. Asteroids of any size hit each other around every 10 million years. And that's because, number one, there aren't very many in space is big, but also number two, because it's been around for billions of years. And so by now, a lot of those collisions that were, if they were going to happen, they sort of already happened. And what you have left is a bunch of asteroids in their own lane. It's like a huge traffic jam, but all the collisions have happened already and all those wrecks have been towed off the road. And now you just have a bunch of clean lanes and safe drivers and everybody sort of go in their own way.

So you can very safely navigate through the asteroid belt, though you'll see some weird stuff. Like some of these rocks that we see in the asteroid belt are kind of hard to understand. Some of them are spinning super fast. Like it takes the Earth 24 hours to rotate one time. But it takes these rocks less than 30 seconds, some of them, to rotate, to do a full rotation. And one of them, the speed champion of the asteroid belt, does an incomplete turn in 10 seconds. So it's spinning like crazy. And while most of the things in the solar system go in the same direction, and that comes from the initial angular momentum of the solar system,

this rotating blob of gas and dust that formed the star and the planets and all that stuff, Some of them are going the opposite direction. They're retrograde. They're like spinning the wrong way. So there's a lot of clues there. There's a lot of clues about how the solar system was formed. Why is the asteroid belt there? Why is it there and look like this?

Why is it had these weird elements in it doing this strange stuff? A lot of fascinating questions to dig into. And we'll dig into them. But first, we'll take a quick break. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change.

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Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show, and we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino.

Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final. The final. And the locker room. I really, really, like, you just. You can't replicate. You can't get back.

It's showing up to locker room every morning just to shit talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college superstar A.Z. Fudd. I mean, seriously, y'all. The guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. All right, so we're talking about the asteroid belt.

What mysteries does it contain? What secrets of the origin of the solar system are hidden there in the asteroid belt? Well, it turns out a lot. And the first question you might ask if you're a scientist is, why isn't there a planet there? Like, why is there an asteroid belt and not just a planet? If you make a plot of the distance from the sun of the various planets, and you start with the ones you know, then there's sort of a gap there. You'd expect there to be a planet there between Mars and Jupiter.

And very early astronomers, they were big into these kind of patterns. We didn't have a detailed mathematical understanding of how things worked. Even before gravity and understanding orbits and stuff, people were just looking at patterns like the distances from these planets to the sun, and it just didn't look right. There was this weird gap there, and it made people think, could there be another planet there hiding? Then, of course, we saw the little rocks there, and people understood, oh, there's no planet there.

There's just sort of a big slew of rocks. But it makes you wonder why. And one of the most natural stories to imagine is maybe there used to be a planet there. Maybe there was an ancient planet and got ripped apart by some disaster. and what we're looking at now is basically the shrapnel from some ancient murder mystery. They even named it as called Fayton, which is a really cool name for a planet. Unfortunately, that's a cool story, but it's unlikely to be the accurate scientific description of what happened there. But it just shows you that people have been thinking about this for a long time.

People have been wondering, why is an asteroid belt there? Why isn't there a planet? And to understand why there isn't the planet there, why we have an asteroid belt, we have to understand two things. first is how the solar system was formed. Where did this all come from anyway? How are any of the planets made, and why wasn't there one made there? Well, we think that the solar system, its ancient progenitor, is just a big cloud of gas and dust and stuff. Some of that gas is hydrogen, which probably comes from the Big Bang.

It's left over from billions of years ago. Some of it is helium, also maybe from the Big Bang, or fuse together hydrogen in the core of stars. and then the rest of it, the heavier elements either made in old stars, which then blew up and spewed their remains all over the universe to be gathered back together by gravity, or even the remnants of neutron star collisions. Remember, all the gold and the heavy elements on earth were made not in stars, not in supernovas, but instead they were made when neutron stars collided, because that's the crazy situation you need to fuse those heavy metals. And we have a whole podcast episode about that, which I suggest people dig into if they like these questions.

So we have the raw materials. We got the hydrogen. We got the helium. We got the heavy stuff. All this is left over from previous activity in the universe. And then what happens? Well, gravity. Gravity is the dominant force that controls the structure of the universe. It's the weakest force. It's totally weird. We don't understand. Is it a force? Is it just a bending of space? Is it something else? Can it be described by quantum mechanics? We have so many questions about gravity. But one thing we do know about it is that it almost always wins in the end because it's patient. And remember that gravity has this other feature that unlike the other forces, it can't be opposed. Like electromagnetism can be balanced. You can have things that are

neutral. But gravity operates on everything with mass. And because we've never seen anything with negative mass, gravity is only attractive. And so it just keeps pulling and pulling and pulling. It's patient, it's slow, but eventually it does what it needs to do. And so you take this huge cloud of gas and dust spread out across an enormous area, and slowly the gravitational forces between these particles, tiny little objects. It tugs them closer and closer and it gathers them together and eventually gathers it together so densely that you get things like stars and planets and other stuff. You might think first, well, why doesn't it just gather everything together? into one big blob, right? Why doesn't it just make a big star? Why do you get anything but the star?

Then initial cloud of gas and dust and particles, it's spinning, of course, because everything in the universe is spinning from some previous interaction that happened, maybe from the initial explosion of the supernova or whatever that generated that stuff. And that spinning can't just go away. Remember, in our universe, we have momentum. So if you push something in space, it'll go forever. If you start something spinning, it'll spin forever until something's stops it. And so this cloud of gas and dust that created our solar system was spinning, and it is still spinning. And that spinning keeps it from collapsing, but only in the direction that it's spinning. It's spinning around a plane. That plane is now the plane of our solar

system. And that's why everything in our solar system is sort of flat, is spinning around the same axis, because that's the original axis of spin. And in that direction, gravity can't do everything. It's opposed by this rotation. The rotation keeps it from falling into the very center. That's why the Earth is in orbit around the Sun rather than just falling in. That's why the Moon is in orbit around the Earth rather than just falling in.

But in the other direction, perpendicular to the plane of the solar system, there's no rotation. And so gravity can do its job and it flattens things as much as it can. So gravity does all this work, and some of the stuff is spread out. Some of the gas and the dust doesn't fall

all the way into the center because of this rotation. So the stuff in the sense, The center condenses into a star and the rest of the stuff grabs itself together. It forms into these distributed objects. And that's how you get the planets. The planets are only there because the original blob was rotating. If it wasn't rotating, we would just have one star. But now you have these large gravitational objects, these planets,

and they start to affect the stuff around them. And Jupiter, of course, is the monster planet. It has most of the mass of all the planets. It's tiny compared to the Sun, but of course it's huge compared to the Earth. Earth, and it has its own gravity. And that gravity is very powerful, and it yanks and it pulls on things. We've talked in this podcast about how Jupiter massages its own moons because of the tidal forces. And this is exactly the issue. We think that the gravity from Jupiter is too strong to let the stuff in the asteroid belt ever pull together to form a planet. So the asteroid belt is

sort of like leftovers from the original formation of the solar system. We think that a long time ago, maybe in the first 10 million years of the solar system, most of the solar system looked a lot like the asteroid belt. It had rocks and chunks of stuff that were slowly gathering together. But Jupiter prevents those rocks in the asteroid belt from getting any further. It keeps them down from creating their own planet. It's like Jupiter is like a union buster, right? It says, nobody get together.

I'm going to treat you all individually. And so the tidal forces from Jupiter prevent this from happening. Every time Jupiter sweeps around, it tugs on all these objects and prevents them from gathering together. Remember, gravity is slow, and gravity is gentle, and it doesn't take that much perturbation to prevent it from pulling all this stuff together. And Jupiter is a big pop of planet,

and when it sweeps around, it messes it all up. And you might think, well, if Jupiter can do that on the inside, why isn't it do that on the outside? Well, the reason is that Saturn is further away from Jupiter. There's a bit more space there, and literally there's more space there, not just in the gap between the objects, but because Saturn is further out,

it has much more space to move, and Jupiter's gravity drops much more rapidly as you get on the outside compared to being on the inside. While it seems more dramatic to have had a planet there, which then got torn up in some sort of ancient battle or collision between objects, that's not the case. In fact, nothing really even got started there. They think there used to be a lot more asteroids in the asteroid belt when the solar system was young, but then those got tugged out of orbit and collided, and probably a lot of those hit the Earth. There was this period in the early solar system called the late heavy bombardment when a lot of objects came raining in and landing on the earth and the other inner planets. So most of the asteroid belt from the very early days

has been lost, either due to collisions like we talked about earlier, hitting other planets, or just getting tugged out of their orbit by Jupiter. So what we have is a small remnant of our original asteroid belt. We're lucky, frankly, to even have it at all. But there are some really fascinating objects in the asteroid belt, and one in particular, that dwarf planet series that holds a special mystery, one that's been in my mind for years. And we'll talk all about it, but first, let's take another break. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was.

Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has. DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, gotcha.

On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford. And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Athea 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, there's like a hyperfixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session first.

1418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino, to the show. And we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, co-hosting a podcast with her fiancé Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more.

Never a dull moment with Pino. Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final. The final. And the locker room. I really, really, like, you just, you can't replicate,

you can't get back. Showing up to locker room every morning just to shit talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college superstar AZ Fud. I mean, seriously, y'all. The guest list is absolutely stacked

for season two. And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. All right, so we're talking about the mysteries of the asteroid belt, why we have it, where it is, what's in the asteroid belt, and the big Papa asteroid in the asteroid belt is actually

a planet, and it's called C-E-R-E-S, and it's pretty big. It's almost a thousand kilometers in diameter. This is no small rock. This is something to be taken seriously. And series is a fascinating object for many reasons, but the thing that really sticks out of me is something which literally sticks out. They sent a probe past, and it took a picture of series, and it saw something really weird on the surface, all right? If you haven't heard of this before, it's going to blow your mind. It blew my mind when I heard it. Series has something on it, which looks like a pyramid. Now, I know pyramids are a favorite element of stories of the occult, and people think maybe aliens came to Earth and built pyramids and all sorts of stuff. And a lot of that,

of course, is nonsense. But there is a weird pyramid on series. And when I first saw these pictures, I gasped. I thought, oh my gosh, maybe. Maybe this is the moment we find an alien artifact. And I read a lot of science fiction, and I'm desperate to find aliens, and in a lot of those science fiction stories where humanity comes across aliens, this is how it starts. We find some weird feature on somewhere in the solar system and can't be explained. I mean, think about 2001, right? The monolith that was there orbiting Jupiter.

What we're looking for is something unnatural, something strange, something which we cannot explain without invoking intelligent life. And something like a pyramid, wow, that's amazing. Now, this pyramid on series is pretty weird. First of all, it rises 5,000 meters above the surface. That's not tiny. That's enormous, especially compared to the size of series. It's fully 1% of the height of series itself.

If you had an object, if you had a feature that big on Earth, it would be eight times higher than Mount Everest, right? in relative size to the Earth. So this is not a tiny mountain. If you were on series, you would definitely know about it. It seems like it's about 200 million years old, and they can date these things by seeing how many collisions there are on nearby stuff. You can tell how old something is in the solar system

just by counting the sort of collision, the impact craters, because everything in the solar system eventually is hit with little rocks. Now, NASA, when they first saw it, they announced this and described this, and I'm going to quote here, they say, it's, quote, like nothing humanity has ever seen. And not only is it something we've never seen before, there's not even any other one on series. It's not like we saw this planet

and we're like, oh, look, it has all these weird bumps on it. How could that be? What makes those? It's maybe evidence of some new geological feature. There's only one. So we have this weird planet in the asteroid belt with this strange pyramid on it. And this is not just a mountain

which looks a little bit like a pyramid. The first pictures, it looked a lot like a pyramid. It looked like an artificial structure. This is the kind of thing that makes people go, wow, we better get another picture of this thing. And so, of course, they did. They sent up more probes, and they focused telescopes on it, and everybody wanted to know what is this weird thing on series. And the short answer is, we still don't really know.

There are some nice ideas. People think that series underneath has a molten core, but it's not molten rock. The inside of the earth, when you dig down into the earth, earth, this molten rock because of all the pressure. Series has molten mud, right? They think that there's water on series, maybe liquid water, and it combines with the surface to make this sort of molten mud, and that sometimes this mud might push up or spew up based on something happening on the inside of series. And this mud is actually not that hot. And so they call this sort of like a cryo-volcano, like a cold volcano. So they think it's like some salty, rock

frozen mud that came out from the interior and pushed up like a big zit. And that's possible. And they have some simulations that suggest this kind of thing could happen. But then why is there only one? Why is there just this one feature? If this is the kind of thing that happens inside series, you would expect to see more than one. And you'd expect to see big ones and then lots of little ones. But, you know, sometimes weird things happen.

Sometimes in the solar system, there's a one-off event. And that could explain it. It could just be a strange one-off event in the solar system that nobody understands. Or, hey, it could be aliens. We're still not 100% sure. Now, don't go running off and tell people that Daniel said there are aliens in the solar system. There probably aren't. That kind of explanation requires extraordinary evidence.

But I really enjoy thinking about it. I really enjoy holding out hope that maybe one of these things we're seeing in the solar system is not just going to tell us about the origins of our solar system. system and how it was formed and how planets are formed and how solar systems everywhere put together. And those are all fascinating questions I want the answer to. But I'm holding out hope that maybe there's a clue in our solar system of something weirder, something grander, something which reveals the secret about the universe we have been dying to know the answer to. Namely, are we alone? And so it turns out that the asteroid belt, not only does it have lots of these

fun mysteries in it, but there's lots of places to hide. There's lots of these asteroids we haven't examined. And there's still the possibility that we could land on one of these and explore it and find something weird, something weirder even than a pyramid. We could find alien technology. We could find all sorts of crazy stuff. The point is that there's a huge amount of area in our solar system that remains unexplored. Lots of opportunities to find life, to find alien civilization, to find all sorts of crazy stuff that would literally blow our minds. And so while we should zoom our minds around the universe and think about all the crazy stuff happening far away and also under our feet, remember that right here in our neighborhood, there are plenty of opportunities to make

mind-blowing, earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting discoveries. All right, this has been an episode of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, all about the mysteries of the asteroid belt. Thanks for tuning in, and if you have questions about something you'd like to hear us talk about, please send them to us at questions at danielanhorpe.com. Thanks for tuning in. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line we'd love to hear from you.

You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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