Endless Thread - Space Heist! (Or, How to Steal a Planet)

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

On December 28, 2004, CalTech astronomer Mike Brown and his colleagues found an unnamed dwarf planet drifting through the far reaches of the solar system. But before they could go public with their finding — as they were dotting their scientific i’s — a little-known team of Spanish astronomers beat them to the punch. José Luis Ortiz Moreno and Pablo Santo-Sanz announced the discovery of what turned out to be the same dwarf planet. Something seemed off, though. Users of an online astronomical message board started to ask: How could two teams on opposite sides of the world simultaneously find the same tiny rock? What they found sparked a philosophical debate that questioned the way science is done and may — or may not — have revealed one of the greatest robberies in modern-day astronomy.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. A couple of weeks ago, Amory and I and our friend Dean went on a field trip. To a place that, to me, was pretty familiar. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Charles Hayden Planetarium for our, what time is it, 11 o'clock? 11 o'clock presentation of Undiscovered World. The Planetarium at Boston's Museum of Science. where, fun fact, I used to work, running many a show on said undiscovered worlds.

We, however, were there to see one specific already discovered world that we heard had a story. An unsolved, internet-connected mystery. So we made our way down the main hall of the Science Museum. But I would usually, like once a month, I'd treat myself to some astronaut ice cream. I just got that for my kids for Christmas. Freaked up. They freaked up. Past a towering, distracting, musical chain reaction type machine called a Rube Goldberg.

Through a locked double door. To an even more towering 40-foot tall dome that, if you look up, kind of looks like Professor X's Cerebro. Silver screen panels arch over a black metallic projector shaped kind of like an imperial probe droid from Star Wars. So we're going to be using our six projectors. You can see there's one right there. There's another one right over there. And then we've got two above the dome right there and two behind us here. So six projectors. Our tour guides, captains, if you will, are two of my favorite former co-workers. I am Talia Soperski. I am the program manager for immersive theaters. My name is Jason Fletcher. I'm associate producer, which means I do 3D animations and help run special events. planetarium and the Omni. I've never known your actual titles. I would just be like,

Talia, she's the bomb. Jason, he's the man. The bomb and the man dimmed the lights, plunging us into a void of darkness. And then they showed us the stars. This is like a video game of the universe, right?

So this is all real data and Talia is controlling time. Can you show me tomorrow's stock prices? Working on it. Oh, well. And then, They took us to the stars. We blasted out of the solar system, out of the Milky Way, out of outer space,

and into a visualization of all the known galaxies in the universe. It's like a Jackson Pollock painting, but every little drop of paint is a freaking galaxy. And also it's like super three-dimensional. Like you can see, this is going to sound like. really dumb, but you can see the space. Do you know what I mean? I think everything that is uttered in a planetarium unless Tali or Jason say it is just going to sound super stonery and bad.

This was a detour, as was our brief stop to witness a supernova. What we were really looking for was a tiny ball of ice and rock that, relatively speaking, is pretty close to home. And admittedly, a bit underwhelming. It looks like a meatball. Or maybe like a matzabal? Yeah, maybe a monsaball, a moldy mottable. Yeah.

Welcome to Hamea, one of our solar system's many distant planetoids, a dwarf planet. Talia projected an animated version of it onto the dome, spinning rapidly. A day on Hamea is just four hours long, and its orbit is 245 Earth years, giving it a little more than 600,000 days in a year. Howmaya is also a very old matzabal, almost from the beginning of the solar system billions of years ago. This icy rock is pretty small. If Earth were a nickel, Hamea would be a sesame seed. You'd need an epic telescope to see it. Are we in the Kuiper Belt, like where Pluto is?

We are. We are. Depending on where in their orbits the two objects are. Howmayo was the second dwarf planet to be discovered, after Pluto, which was found back in 1930s. But that is not why we're here today. We're here because endless thread producer Dean Russell has a question. When was this discovered? It was discovered.

Yeah, it's a little bit of a trick question. It was discovered in the early 2000s. That is accurate. As to the exact date of discovery, that is what the argument is about. A huge argument over when Haumea was discovered, or more to the point, who discovered it. Now, you may have never heard of how maya. Emory and I hadn't.

And so it's possible that you're thinking, who cares who discovered this old moldy meatball? Fair. But this argument that Talia referenced exploded like its own supernova years ago into this enormous philosophical debate that questioned the way science is done, a debate that is very relevant

to just about everyone. today. And this argument also happens to be the tale of how a small pre-Twitter, pre-reddit internet community may have sleuthed out the culprit behind one of the greatest robberies in modern-day astronomy. I'm Amory Severson. I'm Ben Motsabal Johnson. And you're listening to Endless Thread. Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. And today, we bring you what you could reasonably call Space Heist Producer extraordinaire Space Nerd

Meatball enthusiast Dean Russell Hello, hello Dean where does this story start? So first I just want to say because this is a show about internet communities

the internet will come into play here but it'll be a minute Anyway, I came across this story a few months ago when I spoke with this guy offices need toys because you always just need toys Mike Brown is in his 50s.

Wire room glasses, graying stubble, but Mike's a kid at heart. His office in Pasadena, California, is littered with Chotchkes and RC cars and elaborate toys. It's a catapult system that catapults cats, and you catapult one cat to the next cat, which launches a cat, which launches a cat in this whole Rube Goldberg thing. Science loves a good Rube Goldberg. Not real cats, though, right? Not real cats. Anyway, Mike does have a job, which honestly sounds more fun than playing with Rube Goldbergs.

Mike is an astronomer at Caltech. And not just any astronomer. Mike is a planet hunter. You know, if there's a possibility of a planet out there to be found, somebody needs to go look. Now, we know the solar system has eight planets, right? But Ben, Amory, can you guess how many minor planets we have? Relative minor, harmonic minor. Yeah, depends what you mean by minor planets.

Yeah. Well, you guys don't know what? Oh, yeah, it's the opposite of maija. It's minor. Please tell us, Dean. Okay, a minor planet, a minor planet is like an asteroid or a comet or a plutoid or a centaur, which is like a, you know, an asteroid comet hybrid. and maybe most importantly it includes dwarf planets, which we will be talking about.

All right. I'm going to say 7,024. Okay. I'm going to say 7,025. I played a win. Yeah, okay. Well, Ben, congratulations. There are 1,100. 170,640 minor planets in the solar system that we know about.

Price is right rules. All right. Back in the 1990s, this number of minor planets was quite a bit smaller. In fact, the solar system was still kind of an enigma. We didn't even know what the Kuiper Belt, this donut-shaped band of rocks out past Neptune. We didn't know that existed. But telescopes were going through a big technological transition. And astronomers like Mike started finding things.

By the end of 1992, I can't remember the number, but there were probably two or three. By the end of the next year, there might have been a dozen. And by 1997, there were maybe even 100. When you discover something in the solar system, that is a big deal. Not only can that one thing tell us a little more about our solar neighborhood and how we all came to be, it can make your career. Let me guess. Mike was pretty good at finding things. Oh, yes. And determined. It was dead obvious to me that if you scanned wide swaths of sky, you'd find something big.

Well, wait, what does that even mean finding a planet? How do you actually do that? The simplest way is to just take a photo of the sky. And then the next night you take another photo of the same exact patch of sky. And then you compare the two. my phone? No, but I know this. I remember this. So things that are really far away, like stars, they appear to stay in the same place relative to the other stars. That's why we have constellations. But then the things that are closer to Earth, like planets, those appear to move ever so slightly night to night. And so let's fast forward to December 28th of 2004. Mike's in his office,

no doubt surrounded by 2004-era toys. You wake up in the morning, you start to look at your data, you don't know that this is the day you're going to find something that is going to be a major scientific discovery of the outer solar system, and boom. Mike and his colleagues find a wanderer, a big one. This was the brightest thing we'd ever seen in the outer solar system. And this was clear to us that this was going to be a major discovery.

Mike's team gave this thing. a secret code name, just a long string of numbers and letters. A few years later, it would be given the official name Halmea, aka the matzabal we saw at the planetarium. And Mike was psyched. So what do you do in that situation? Like, who do you call? Who are you, get me the president?

Who do you tell? How do you announce your discovery? You can do one or two things. You can announce it the second you discover it and say, we just found something really bright in this guy. And people are like, wow, what is it? And we're like, well, we don't know anything about it, sorry. Or you can work really hard for six months and know something, learn something about it.

So this makes sense to me because tons of people have probably thought that they discovered something at some point and got it wrong. Yeah. Anyway, he and his colleagues decided to lay low. And over the course of several months, they secretly started to learn more about it. We knew about its rapid rotation. We knew that it was a surface covered in water but was actually as dense as a rock, like the world's worst Eminem. We knew it had a moon around it. So we had all sorts of information about this object, and we were pretty excited to share it with the world.

All right. So after this, does Mike announce it? I was literally going to finish that paper and submitted to a scientific journal that day, literally, when my wife went into labor a couple weeks early. And so I dropped it, went to the hospital. Oh, no. I mean, oh, yay, but oh, no. What happens next for Mike? He's in a totally different orbital field. That's right.

Planet Baby. Planet Baby. Yeah, for a little while, not much happens for Mike on the planet front. This was in early July 2005 that he had the baby. Mike and his colleagues had planned to make the announcement that fall at an astronomy conference in London. So Mike's team sent a vague description of their talk for the conference's website. It used the code name for Halmea, so no one knew what they were really going to talk about.

But after that, it was all paternity leave. Uh-oh. I know that somehow this is going south. I'm not sure how, but I know it's going south. You're on to something. Later that month on July 28th. You know, I'm in my groggy state of not. sleeping, and I get this email from Brian Marsden, who is the head of the International Astronomical Union,

minor, the king of the solar system. Brian Marsden, he's the head of the minor planet center, the organization that officially catalogs all the stuff in our solar system. So yeah, he's pretty much the king. Anyway, Brian said, I just got this report of a new object that had been discovered. And I quick looked and I realized, oh, crap, they had just reported the discovery of how may I. You two know what this feels like, right? Someone beat you to a story or buys the same gift and gives theirs first.

This is not a good feeling. Yeah, that's what you get for having a baby. True speak. True speak. You're going to get beat out on some things. I guess so. And it's hard because it was only a few days before Mike got that email. on July 25th, that thousands of miles away at the Astrophysics Institute of Andalusia in Spain, a junior researcher had stumbled upon the same icy rock, Halmaea,

or as the Spanish team referred to it, the big TNO, trans-Neptunian object. Trans-Neptunian object as in an object beyond Neptune. Right. And so the researcher went immediately to his boss, a middle-aged astronomer named Jose Luis Ortiz Moreno. Ortiz wrote to the Minor Planet Center and then announced his team's discovery to the world. The way science works correctly is, even though we saw it first,

if they announce it first, they are the discoveries. And that's important because that puts the pressure on people to not hang on to their discoveries forever and then say, oh, no, no, I discovered that. 10 years ago, I just didn't tell you. You know, they were legitimately the discovers. That's the way it works. Perfectly fine. I have a feeling it wasn't perfectly fine, was it?

Nope. Because when a small internet community of space nerds caught wind of what happened, they started raising questions. What they found in 360 Helmeo seconds. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science. neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about

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what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice, beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Ben, Amory, I'm thinking of one of the earliest

forms of social media. Can you guess what I'm thinking of? Myspace. Friendster? Live journal. Earlier? Geo-Cities? Earlier?

I don't know what Geo-Cities are. Email groups. Aha. Yes. Mailing lists. Mailing lists. The messy reply all forums, like the grandmother of Reddit. So more trivia on mailing list.

Do you know when these things or how these things came about? Oh, I would say like they had to have started around the time that email as like a function started. Yeah. Yeah, they came out of ARPANET. They were like the modern day salon for academics at the time. And back in 2005, there was a popular place for a store. astronomers to hash out ideas, the minor planet mailing list, which sounds pretty cool to me. Yeah, I wasn't invited into it, so they're out of my solar system.

So on July 28th, the day Mike Brown got the devastating email about Haumea, the Spanish astronomer Jose Luis Ortiz Moreno announced his team's discovery to the mailing list, subject line, important news. Ortiz ragged a bit, saying this thing could be Pluto's father in size. Remember, Ortiz didn't spend months studying Helmaya, so he didn't know that what he was saying was totally wrong. But that mailing list freaked out, I bet. Yep. And first they were pumped, threads and threads of congratulations and questions and things like that. No one yet knew that Mike had already found Helmea.

But one user from Hawaii started to put the pieces together. He messaged the group saying, wait, but is this the same discovery as K-40506A? That's the code name. Yeah. That's the code name. Yeah, that's the code name. K-dog.

It's got a beautiful ring to it. For short. It might have been surprising that anyone knew what the code name was. And this may have been worrisome because in the high-stakes game of who saw at first astronomy, Mike's team

locked their stuff down. Their data, coordinates, telescope aperture, etc., all that stuff was kept under a tight, heavy lid. But then, back on that mailing list, a user from France responded. He didn't work with Mike, didn't even know Mike as far as I can tell. But this French guy posted everything.

Tons and tons of Mike's data. The tight heavy lid had a leak. What did this website look like? It's like bare bones? Really bare bones. I mean, I'm old-fashioned. I write HTML by hand. Okay.

Every astronomer needs a Richard Poguee. Richard is a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University. Also, I was part of a group that builds astronomical instruments. Richard builds telescopes, and he was running the telescope that Mike's team used to find Helmaya. He had created an online portal where different astronomers could. access their telescope logs. This was pretty new at the time.

Anyway, each project was organized by its code name. And Richard will never forget Helmaya's code name. This one was called K40506A. So what does Richard remember about seeing this news that Ortiz has discovered K405.06A? KDOT. KDOT. I was watching this and thinking, wow, this is pretty cool.

I was actually starting to change my lecture for an upcoming talk I was going to give on Pluto and Beyond for my astronomy class coming up in the following semester. He had no idea, though, that Ortiz had found what Mike had already found. Then Richard got a call from a member of Mike's team. Asking me, who had access to the pointing logs of the telescope? Did you know the answer to that then? No, I didn't. I said, you know, I really never thought about it that could someone else get into our logs. so I promised to go away and think about it. Mike's team wanted to know how someone, like the mailing list, Randos,

could get access to the telescope logs. Because if the Randos could do it, maybe Ortiz's team could do it too. Right, because I guess it's extremely unlikely that two astronomy teams discover the same object within months of each other. And it felt even less likely when Richard started looking through the website's security coding. And he realized it had a typo. First words out of my mouth were not printable. Richard.

That's not very scientist-ee, Richard. When you're securing a website, you can prevent it from being accessed by Google searches. That's what Richard thought he had done. Turns out he was wrong. And so if you knew the code name for, say, Howmea, you could, if you knew K-Dog, you could hack into the telescope, logs by just Googling that codename. That's what the French guy on the minor planet mailing list did. And it seemed possible that that is what Ortiz's team did too.

Okay, but wait, the French guy, the list serve guy, and maybe Ortiz, they know this secret code name. How? If you remember, Mike's team planned to announce how Maya's discovery at a London astronomy conference that fall. The conference posted a rundown online in July. In there was Howmayas' code name. Okay, so the detective work here is suggesting what?

Ortiz's team found the codename, Googled the code name, found the telescope logs, and then claimed the discovery for themselves. Is that? I mean, that seems possible, but it's just as possible that they found Howmaya on their own, right? Well, Richard did a little bit more digging, and he started looking at the IP addresses of everyone who'd ever looked at the K-Dog telescope logs. 40, 50,000 IP addresses in this list, most of which were Google bots. So as I began to roll through them, I recognized one pattern that didn't look like the others. And they all pointed back to the Institute for Astronomy in Spain.

And I just sat there for a while with my mouth open going, oh no, oh no, oh no, what have I found? Ortiz's team had visited the telescope blogs on July 26th, two days before they announced their discovery to the world. Woof. Well, I mean, what it really turned into is generally fraud. So Mike definitely thinks his discovery was stolen. What does he do? I sent an email to Ortiz and saying, um, so, can you explain to me what's going on?

And he came back very vehement saying, this is all your fault. You should never have been hiding these objects to begin with, which is a pretty astonishing statement. That's like a very, I feel like Trump-era move. This is your fault. It's your fault that this happened, sir. You made me do this.

You made me. If you didn't put it out there, I wouldn't have stolen it. So I reached out to Ortiz's team multiple times. For months, no one responded, until just before this story was set to publish. Okay, first, I want to say that this is just my personal opinion, right, about something that happened about 17 years ago. Is that Ortiz? This isn't Ortiz. Okay. This is Pablo Santos Sands. He's the researcher who says he's the one on Ortiz's team who first saw Halmea, the big TNO. I jump on my chair, and I was very excited thinking that perhaps it was a real TNO.

Perhaps I was discovering the brightest ever discovered apart from Pluto itself. Pablo is an established astronomer now. But back in 2005, he was a PhD candidate, 33 years old, long curly hair, glasses, goatee, eager. At the beginning, there was a moment of joy after the discovery and also many, many congratulated as for the discovery. But unfortunately, this was only for a short period of time. According to Pablo, he first saw Helmé on July 25, 2005.

It was late, so after he told Ortiz his boss, they decided to go home and get some rest. The next day, they started doing some homework, trying to make sure that this thing they'd found hadn't already been discovered. You don't stay up late? Yeah, I was going to say, how do you even sleep after that?

Yeah, how do you, you just discovered maybe another, you know, the big T&O and you just go home? You're like, oh, we'll pick it up in the morning. We just discovered something. Maybe we'll pick it up in the morning. Okay, all right. Let's get a good night's rest first. Yeah.

They're very tired, man. I don't know what to tell you. Anyway, they checked the minor Planet Center's database the next day. There was nothing there. And then they saw the conference website. K Dogg was described as a bright TNO. And they wondered. Could it be the same object that we had just discovered?

So to take it, I did the, I think, the logical thing, that anyone would have done to just Google. Astronomers, they're just like us. And yes, they found Mike Brown's telescope blogs, but... We did not come to any conclassion as to whether or not the object was the one we had detected in our images. So we didn't know. They didn't know if Mike's object was their object. So they went ahead and claimed their discovery any.

Anyway, figuring if they found something that was already registered with the Biner Planet Center, then the center would let them know. But as we know, Mike hadn't registered Helmea, and it blew up in Pablo's face. I don't know. Do you think that Mike Brown and his colleagues were being unfair in the conclusion that they drew? Like, what do you think about that? I think they were tremendously unfair in the way they respond. I remember a few emails attacking not only the science we were doing, but also our person.

So I feel really bad with this, because I was in the middle of something and I didn't understand why. Because at that point, I only was starting my mind. So, sure, you could see their reaction, saying this was kind of Mike's fault for keeping Halmea a secret. You could call that proto-Trump. And yet, Pablo might just be giving his honest opinion. Science is not a personal thing, right? It's, okay, at the end, science, I think, is more than us. I think, is in another level. This makes me, I have to say this, makes me sad.

Why? Because, like, this is what space is supposed to really, like, make humanity realize that we're all part of the same family, right? Yeah. And I think Pablo's sort of getting at that. And this dispute makes me sad that you have these two astronomers who actually feel not like they're part of the same family in this particular instance very strongly. Yeah. that's much deeper than my reaction, which is just like, I went into this thinking like, yeah, Pablo, why'd you steal the planet? And now, after listening to him, I'm like, oh, no, he sounds very genuine.

And now I'm at a loss. And that last thing we just heard him say, you're right, Ben. It's like deeply sad that any of us might feel like we own the knowledge of the, of the actual universe, because that should be a shared thing. I will say that I genuinely, maybe like you, Amory, don't know which narrative to believe. All right. So let's go back to this mailing list because that French guy tipped everyone off, right? He basically did the same thing Ortiz did.

He found the conference website with Haumea's code name, Googled K-Dog, found Mike's data on K-Dog. so the mailing list knew something was up, right? Yeah. So one would think the minor planet mailing list would back Mike Brown. But some users cited with Ortiz saying Mike was being an American chauvinist, which one could maybe understand given, you know, history. It is possible that Ortiz was telling the truth. So why not give him the benefit of the doubt, right?

Yeah. And they also said that Mike's choice to study Halmea in secret for months, that was antithetical not only to astronomy, but science. Because science is the results of collective fact-finding. This debate leapt out of the forum into headlines. It spiraled across scientific fields. Like a wobbly meatball. Exactly like a wobbly meatball. I'm going to ask for your judgments here

because this is a debate as old as science. When do you study and when do you reveal? And before you decide, I want you to think about a different slice of science. Everyone should wear masks in order to protect themselves, but not necessarily an N95 mask. In that case, you want one of these better masks. You've probably heard of an N95. We have secured 70,000 hydrochlorated.

and there is a good basis to believe that they could work. Turns out finding an effective treatment is far more complicated than just one study using a petri dish. Because what they say is maybe we don't need boosters because the vaccines are still doing their job. But I think people should not lose sight of the message that there's no doubt that if you want to be optimally protected, you should get your booster. These past two years have been confusing. Studies about masks and fomites and hydroxyclose. and vaccines with results that aren't always peer-reviewed or are contradictory or preliminary or wrong. And we know now more than ever that one study is really just one study.

Right. But some people will cling to that one finding that seems to confirm their worldview and they'll like forget everything else. And even if better studies come out later, they'll just stick to that original one and never change their, opinion. So one could argue that maybe this specific finding that seems too good to be true or too bad to be true, maybe that should be held, kept secret for a bit, and studied further. Then again, if you hold valuable information in a pandemic, that's not good either. So, if you have to choose aside, early but unverified, verified but late, what do you choose? for me it has to do with the stakes like there there is not human life at stake we hope if if we know about how maya or we don't know about how maya unless it's coming at us unless it's coming right unless it's hurtling towards us global death by meatball I could happen but this is just something like you said this is something that we face every day in the work that we do because

we would rather get things right than get them first. So I think I still fall on that side, even though, as Mike Brown knows, it's risky and it sucks. I'm a transparency guy, I think. To me, it's like it benefits the world to be transparent as early and often as possible and be honest and straightforward. and I think as long as the world receives that transparency, you know, generously and responsibly, and like it's received by people who act good upon that transparency,

then that's a good thing. But again, it really depends on people behaving well in response to the transparency, to the messiness of transparency. And that's not always the case, right? And so it's complicated. In fact, Hamea is not a ball. It is much more football-shaped. It is an ellipsoid.

And that has to do with the fact that it is spinning so quickly. It's got a very rapid spin. It spins in only four hours. And nothing that size in our solar system spins that fast, except Helmaya. So Hamaya's basically going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. For eternity, yes. If your head is spinning like Helmaya, there's one more part of this story.

After the astro espionage came to light, the minor planet center, the governing body in charge of cataloging planetoids, it was at a loss. Who should we say discovered Helmea? Today, if you look up this icy rock in the minor planet center database, the spot that says discoverer is blank. It's the largest object in the solar system, you know, discovered in the last hundred years with no official discoverer. And now no one cares. And, you know, today I don't care. It was a little harder at the time.

Usually the person who discovers an object gets to name it. So when Mike and Ortiz's teams sent their proposals to the Minor Planet Center, it had to make a decision. Ortiz and Pablo proposed Adesina, an Iberian deity. Because Mike had just had a baby, his team suggested the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth, Howmaya. I asked Pablo Santos Sanz if he was, would have done anything differently. He told me if he'd had to do it again,

he would just call Mike Brown and ask if the object they found was the same. And of course, in that case, the story would have been, I think, very different. Maybe sweeter for both teams, I think so. Without being too sugar-coded, maybe the moral of Hohmea, or K-Dog, Ben, is that we are all part of the same galactic family.

So don't be afraid to pick up the phone and call your fellow astronomers. Who are probably awake anyway at ungodly hours, you know, giving their new babies, bottles. Thanks, Dean for bringing us this story. Yeah, thanks, Dean. Thank you. This looks like hyperdrive. Yeah. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, punch it chewing. Punch it chewing, yeah. See how the center isn't circulate. It's sort of... Oh, yeah. It's like a little bar. Like a little fun-sized Twix. Mm, yeah.

Yeah. This is what we think the Milky Way looks like. You're saying it looks like a Milky Way? Is that what you're telling me? Yeah, why did I go to Twix? Are you telling me? We're the Twix Galaxy. Guys, breaking news.

The Milky Way looks like a Twix. Oh, this is cool. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. Want early tickets to events, swag, bonus content, Ben's X-Men Figuring Collection, Amory's Star Wars fanfic. Join our email list. You can find it at WBUR.org slash Endless Thread. Also, by the way, do us a favor and review us if you like the show.

Throw a review up on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Google Podcasts or Google Podcasts or You know, wherever you listen. This episode was written and produced by Dean Russell. It's hosted by us, Amory Severson. And Ben Brock Johnson, mix and sound design by Emily Jenkowski. Additional production from Nora Sacks and Quincy Walters. Our web producer is Rachel Carlson. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities and a moldy matzabal.

We need to work on your spelling of matzabal, but I appreciate that. If you've got an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or a wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Email endless thread at wbUR.org.