Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Evidence for Planet 9? A conversations with Caltech Professor Konstantin Batygin! (#137)

Episode Date: April 19, 2021

Thanks to today’s sponsor, LinkedIn Jobs! Visit linkedin.com/impossible to post your job ad for FREE! A chat about a new paper by Dr. Konstanin Batygin and Mike Brown about the Injection of Inner Oort Cloud Objects Into the Distant Kuiper Belt by Planet Nine. Planet Nine is an as yet undiscovered planet that may lurk in the outer solar system. Read the paper: Injection of Inner Oort Cloud Objects Into the Distant Kuiper Belt by Planet Nine by Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.05799.pdf​ Konstantin’s Band https://theseventhseason.net/​ Support the Into the Impossible podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating And please join my mailing list to get resources and enter giveaways to win a FREE copy of my book (and more) http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 📝 🎥 🎥 Watch my most popular videos🎥 🎥 Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Michael Saylor The Physics of Bitcoin https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuqyAvX7Wo?sub_confirmation=1 Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. We're talking to Professor Constantine Batijian. Is that my pronouncing your name correctly, Constantine? It's a good approximation. You know, it's good enough for astrophysics. I don't speak, I speak three fewer languages than you. I know you speak three languages. That's like negative five languages.

Well, it is great to meet you. I know your legends. You're very extremely accomplished, and you're in the small technical college, I believe, Caltech up north in Los Angeles. Yeah. That's right. We're accredited. Yeah. What are you going to say?

Oh, no, I just said we're accredited. We just passed accreditation. When I was there, the football team would regularly lose to junior varsity high school football teams, but that's not why people go to. Caltech and I think that they've gotten better and we're joined with a nice crowd on YouTube as well and that is for good reason because Constantine has some fantastic new results about a planet that shall be called number nine revolutionary as the Beatles would say revolution number nine planet number nine now first of all I thought there was a planet number nine. I was talking this week with Neil deGrasse Tyson, who at one point claimed that

Pluto was not the ninth planet. So what's the current status? Where do you come down on this eternal battle? Is Pluto a planet? Is Pluto not a planet? I mean, you know, I just, I don't care that much. You know, that's like I'm pretty orthogonal to the whole debate. My viewpoint on all these things is that, you know, it's got a mass, it's got a radius, you know, it's got real physical quantities that you can really talk about and kind of that are actually interesting. Pluto actually geologically is very interesting as well. That said, like, does it, you know, if I was to choose, does it arise up to the kind of concept of a planet? I mean, my sense is, of course not, right? Pluto is rather unaware of its own work. Right. I mean, I tend to think

about planets as things that are sufficient gravitational drivers in the dynamics of a planetary system where if you remove it, something changes dramatically, right? If you remove Pluto, nothing will change. And in any case, the story of how Pluto acquired its planetary status, is a really remarkable one, right? Pluto was initially mistaken for the seven Earth mass planet X that was predicted at the time. And upon its discovery, its mass was revised downwards to one Earth mass.

Of course, nobody really knew how to measure mass. You need a satellite. When Keron was discovered in 1970, 78, it was like, whoa, you know, this thing is, you know, really quite tiny. So, so yeah, it's a really, I think, much more interesting than the question of definition about what is a planet, what is not, is actually the historical arc, right? The parsival-lull story of looking for planet X is a fascinating piece of kind of astronomical history and how that linked to the discovery of Pluto is really phenomenal.

Yeah, all the planets, at least beyond the ones known since antiquity, I think I heard that Galileo accidentally could have discovered. Here's Galileo. Constantine, someday you'll have a sock puppet too, a finger puppet too, but this is Galileo, the first mariner of the skies using telescopic aid. And he had some success with observing planets, as you know, with Jupiter and Saturn. He thought, and he actually encrypted his findings. You may be able to explain this better than me, but he would write, you know, in like backwards handwriting and, and he would write in like rhymes and limericks. One of them was the fifth planet, an altitude is threefold. And that was, of course, he couldn't resolve the rings of Saturn.

Nowadays, it seems like people wouldn't sit on a discovery of planet nine. So are you, are you burying the news? Are you hiding, obfuscating that you've seen planet nine? Or what are we looking at with this fantastic new paper that I'll show on this. It's all an anagram, right? If you just, no, no, no. So we, of course, you know, it would be an immediate, it would be an immediate announcement the moment we or I think anybody else for that matter discovers Planet 9.

But the observational search for Planet 9 has generically been going horribly. And this is not because, you know, we've collected zero data. It's been horribly because, of course, when you're looking for one object, it is going horribly until you discover it and then it's going great. So, you know, in parallel with the kind of observational arc of looking for Planet 9, we're always pushing the theoretical framework forward. And this is kind of the latest in our, you know, in our process. program to make the planet nine models maximally realistic. We spent some time about three, four years ago, actually going the opposite way, developing models that are maximally simplistic to get an analytical handle on the dynamics,

understand it better. But here, we are doing the opposite. We have decided to go and basically look at, you know, state of the art that we had from a couple years ago and say, okay, what is missing, right? What is missing from the theory as it stands right now? And the answer here is simple to summarize. We often, in our models, treat, and this is not just us, like, everybody does this, right? If you're worried about the solar system, you treat the solar system as the entirety of the universe, right? as far as your simulation is concerned, right?

You've got the sun at the center and you draw a sphere of, you know, whatever, 10,000, 20,000 AU around it. And things that leave that sphere are just deleted from the simulations and never heard from again. And, you know, importantly, nothing ever comes into that sphere either. That's not really true, right? The solar system did not form in isolation. It formed in a cluster of stars, just like, most stars do. And so we decided to really

take a closer look at this. What are the consequences of properly modeling the early evolution of the solar system? And the answer is that early in its during the first few million years

of the sun's evolution in its birth cluster, Jupiter and Saturn form eject a bunch of material, but some of that material gets trapped in a quasi-sphysical cloud around the sun, what we now call the inner ord cloud. And if Planet 9 is not there, it's not really a big deal. The inner orde cloud just sits there forever. But if Planet 9 is there, and I think it is, then its gravity acts to reinject some of that material back into the distant Kuiper belt. So we're right.

topic of this room. Oh, sorry, melt up. Hi, guys. On Clubhouse, sorry. We got people on Clubhouse. We're talking about Planet Nine. Maybe, Catherine, I'll make you a moderator. Can you change the name or no?

Is that impossible? All right. We're talking Planet Nine, so I'll take questions for Professor Constantine Batigen of Caltech later on, but it's a fascinating discovery that is being announced. We're talking about the impact of objects beyond the Kuiper Belt, right? We're talking about Khyber Belt or beyond Kuiper Belt objects, Constantine. Yeah, these are really things beyond the Kuiper Belt. I mean, to give some scale, some sense of scale, right?

Neptune's at 30 astronomical units, meaning it's 30 times as far away from the sun as is the Earth. You know, Pluto's at 40, roughly speaking. The objects that inform from which we infer the existence of Planet 9, And these are things that are hundreds of AU, right, hundreds of times as far away from the sun as the Earth. We're now talking about reinjecting things back into the solar system from thousands, right? This is not quite flirting with the conventional Ord Cloud, like where Ord Cloud comets come from, because that's yet another order of magnitude further out. That's, you know, 20,000, 50,000 AU.

That's kind of old, right? starting to flirt with, you know, quarter of the way to the next star, this is still, you know, closer in, but as it turns out, if Planet Nine is there, inner Ord Cloud material gets re-injected into the outer solar system

and mixes in with the Kuiper Belt. Now, that pollution of the distant Kuiper Belt by this Ord Cloud material is something we hadn't really ever modeled before. And when we account for this effect in these new models, planet nine becomes somewhat more eccentric. The best fit planet nine becomes marginally more eccentric, which is important for the observational search.

After all, if something is a little bit more eccentric, its abhealian is a little bit further away. The thing is a little dimmer. I don't actually expect this to change our observational strategy by a long shot, by a new account, But this does contribute to kind of the limits that we place with the observational search. I had Professor Avi Loeb on the podcast talking about his controversial theory of Omuamua as originating as an extra solar piece of technology,

not just from a solar system formation in its own Kuiper Belt or its own Ork Cloud. How polluted or how fall of traffic is the Kuiper Belt? Is it like Los Angeles right about now, or is it, you know, contrary to the impression of it kind of being jam-packed with debris and icebergs and so forth? How dense in population is the Ork Cloud and Khyber Belt, rather? Yeah. I mean, if I was, I don't know, I think the better, the better analogy than Los Angeles now would be like middle of New Mexico during COVID when nobody is driving. nobody is driving. I mean, it is astonishing actually how despite there being, you know, whatever number of objects there are, the space between them is huge. Now, the question that

you can immediately ask, so like that, I guess where I'm going with this is the Kuiper Belt, at the scale of objects that we usually care about, right? So things that are, you know, 100 kilometers across or 10 kilometers across. It's completely collisionless. Those particles will never come into contact with one another. They'll never see one another. It's cumulative gravity is negligible. As far as the question of, you know,

what about the amount of material that gets injected into the Khyper Belt through from the Ord Cloud? There, we can actually make an estimate. it, and I think it's on the order of a percent of an earth mass over the age of the solar system. You might say, well, that doesn't sound like very much, but the Kuiper Belt itself is about 1% of an earth mass cumulatively. So, you know, it's kind of, it's a competing mass scale for, for if you were to kind of compare bona fide, you know, Khyber Belt objects that are real, you know, things that have been scattered out by Neptune and things that have been re-injected back.

If I'm not mistaken, Kuiper, he actually postulated it, and not in the context of early solar system dynamics, but really as a form of dark matter. Isn't that correct that there was some connection between the Kuiper Belt and a proposed resolution of the dark matter conundrum that most of the matter we see via its gravitational effects is non-luminous and non-interacting? and it's thought that this Kuiper belt could provide some of that. But as you're saying, it's incredibly low density, right? It's totally insufficient.

Yeah, yeah. It's pathetic, right? The Kiperbilt is pathetic. I scoff every time I think about the Kuiper belt. That's just how pathetic. What about the Ord Cloud? Is the Ord Cloud any more, you know, of a force to be reckoned with? A little bit, yeah.

So what's interesting is at least for the Kuiper Belt, we have measures of mass that are dynamic. like you can use telemetry of spacecraft to put limits on the amount of mass out there. And that's kind of where you get the sort of 1% of an Earth mass or something like that. With the classical Ord Cloud, our understanding comes from, you know, here comes a comet with a period of 100,000 years. Let's now estimate how many there are in total. And so if you do the numbers, you get about four. five earth masses in total, but if it was 0.5, you could still make the numbers. So there's sort of an order of magnitude uncertainty, but the best fit number for the

classical ord cloud is, you know, five earth masses. The inner ord cloud, a little bit less. Now, if there were to suddenly be, you know, someone who's even more vehemently opposed to the Kuiper Belt and even the ord cloud, and this omnipotent being, completely vaporizes and annihilates all the material of the Kuiper belt and the Orch Cloud, would we ever have any effect here on Earth? Would it make life safer on Earth than avoid the cometary disaster that befell the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago? Yeah. So great question. This actually ties beautifully into the story of how the Kiper Belt was postulated in the first place, which is different from what Kuiper said.

If you read Kuiper's actual original paper, it's very speculative. It's kind of like, I'm not saying there's a Kuiper, but I'm just saying like maybe there might be one. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. That's kind of the extent of certainty. But in the 80s, as computers became faster, and people like Martin Duncan started doing simulations of, in fact, the very question that you're asking about, cometary flux, you know, it became clear that the solar system would run out of Jupiter family

comets on a time scale much shorter than the age of the solar system. So the fact that we have a cometary flux, you know, which, where it looks like it's coming from Jupiter, means that Jupiter itself is sourcing comets from somewhere further away. And these are things that come from, indeed the Kuiper belt, particularly the scattered disk population of the Kuiper belt, is one where Neptune will occasionally just scatter things out of the solar system and they're gone forever, or will scatter things inwards. And then the giant planets sort of play soccer with these pieces of debris until they reach Jupiter's orbit. Once Jupiter injects the material into the inner solar system, we see activation of coal.

see real comments that we then oftentimes refer to as Jupiter family comments, but they're really sourced from the Kuiperl. So if we destroy the Kuiper Belt, we will remove one source of commentary bombardment. If we destroy the Ord Cloud, we will remove another source of commentary bombardment. We'll remove the Ord Cloud comments. But will we remove all impacts? No, of course now because many of them are, in fact, sourced from the asteroid belt. The asteroids, due to radiative effects, drift into resonances with Jupiter, get into the Kirkwood gaps, basically, get their eccentricities excited until they cross Mars, and then Mars shoots them onto Earth.

So meteorites follow this chaotic route to the Earth's orbit. So as much as I would, I think it's a good idea to destroy the Kuiper Belt, it won't make the, you know, life safe. So we're talking to Professor Constantine Betejan, who as is as hilarious as he is brilliant. You may have seen him as I did first on 60 Minutes. What was that? Five, six years ago, your work with Mike Brown and Bill Whitaker, I remember poking around. That was about 2017, 2016.

It feels like it was about 59 minutes ago. I mean, really, it's amazing how rapid. rapidly time passes, particularly, you know, like everybody knows about time dilation due to gravity, but time dilation due to COVID is really profound. And kids, too, you're a father, and you must know that the longest period of time is the time between dinner time and bedtime for any child or any parent has to endure. That is where time dilation really kicks in, doesn't it? Exactly. Exactly.

we're all doing our best. So back in January, I mean, at that time in 2016, I became aware of you from work that you did with Mike Brown, who is the Pluto killer. He was your thesis advisor, right? Yeah, back in the day. Back in the day. Yeah, back in the day. It's, again, you know, I now teach some of the classes I took as a grad student. and I just, you know, I used to take great kind of like, you know, kind of, you know, in a tongue-in-cheek way, talk about how when I took this class, you know, everything was different.

But these days, it's like when I took this class, really everything was different. All right. Just a few years ago. Yeah, yeah. It's unbelievable. That's right, yeah. So in that paper, in that time, you were talking about Sedna and Sedna-like object. What the heck is Sedna?

What happened to it? How come I don't hear about it? Was it just one of these flash in the pan, Hollywood, you know, flings that come and go like a comment in the Word Cloud? What is Sedna? Is it still there? And what's a Sedna-like object? It's 100%. It's definitely still there.

I'm feeling it's gravity. Well, I'm not really feeling it's gravity. I'm feeling it's quintessence right now. Yeah. Look, Sedna, it was a huge discovery at the time. It was the first truly clear indication that. that the solar system is not done, right? That there's something really remarkable that's going to be,

that's hiding beyond the observational frontier, even of the Kuiper Belt itself. Now, the Kuiper Belt, when it started getting mapped out, people were very excited about all of the dynamical structure that it exhibits. That study helped, that kind of collective study helped really rewrite the story about how the solar system evolved in its first 10 to 100 million years. But Sedna was something different altogether. So when Mike and company discovered it, I guess, back in 2003 or 2004,

I actually remember hearing about it. I was in high school at the time, but this dude in my history class was like, bro, they found Planet X. So, yeah, so like, yeah, so like, yeah, so what's weird about Sedna is that while the vast majority of Khyber Belt objects are easy to understand with the current markup of the planets that that we know and love, Sedna never really interacts with anything, right? It's perihelian. Its closest approach to the sun is more than twice as far away from the sun as is Neptune. So it never directly, it never really sees Neptune's, you know, it never seems Neptune as a individual particle, if you will. It only sees the kind of orbit-average quadruple potential of Neptune or anybody else for that matter.

So it just kind of sits there. Now, if you see that, you might say, okay, that's kind of weird. reason it's weird is that vast majority of long period orbits were scattered out by Neptune. But if they get scattered out by Neptune, because gravity is conservative, they always have to come back to where they started from. So all of these objects are just kind of tethered to Neptune. Sedna is not. It was the first tip of the iceberg of a population of bodies that look like they've been pulled away from the giant planet. and are now just sort of doing their own thing.

Now, the entire Planet 9 story was constructed from, at least one of the original arguments was to say, look, if you look at the distant solar system, there is clustering. What we see now in the current dataset, which is really quite, in my opinion, profound, is that the clustering is much stronger among these objects, that have been strongly pulled away from Neptune, these detached Khyber Belt objects. The objects that are attached to Neptune

are all over the place. And to give ourselves just a little bit of credit, even back in 2016, we wrote about this in the first paper about how only the dynamically stable objects should cluster. And the fact that that's kind of been reflected the data is pretty is pretty exciting. Of course, it's no, you know, it's not like reason to, you know, call the game and say we're done, but it's certainly going into the right direction. Yeah, it's fascinating. And I want to point out, you know, what you do, do you think of your,

how do you think of yourself besides being a father, husband, musician, you know, world famous 60 Minutes, Superstar. How do you think of yourself? Are you, uh, should people think of you as a guy with the telescope, you know, looking out at the sky, or is it a scientist looking into a computer? What do you focus mostly on? Because the paper I'm showing on the screen is a lot of, you know, it looks like a lot of spirograph activity going on over here. So to what extent can we have confidence in the existence of this object if you're not seeing it through a telescope?

Yeah, that's a great question. And look, I actually think this is a, this hits on an important topic because oftentimes the planet nine story kind of gets over amplified both ways, right? There's kind of, there's some pleasure in kind of proclaiming that planet nine is just, oh my God, it's so there, it's just, you know, it's going to be any minute now or, you know, or like planet nine is dead, right? Planet nine really is in some sense, you know, a little bit like Schrodinger's cat, where it has a wave function of being in existence until we measure it.

And that probability really hinges on a few different things. It hinges on how certain are we that the, first of all, how certain are we on that the patterns that we see in the distant solar system really are there? Now, you can, this has been a subject of some debate, okay, in the last, you know, a few months including. But, you know, the way there's, and there's indeed multiple ways to do the statistical analysis. The kind of analysis that we've done suggests a false alarm probability of sort of one in 500, right? That kind of point two percent. The other thing that I should note is in all of these models, all that really happens at the end of the days, all that we can say is that there is some external gravity.

So we can assign a mass and an orbit to the external protuber, right? Whether like the fact that this is a planet is just us making it up, right? We think that a planet is the most reasonable source of a five-earth-mass object on such a gravity. But in principle, the orbits would – the calculations would work as well if this was a five-earth-mass burrito or, you know, a five-earth mass tissue. Like just really anything that has five-earth mass, you know, that orbits on the right orbit would do the job. Now, finally, to answer your question about, you know, whether or not I use a telescope, I've gotten involved with observations as part of this project because that's been something that I've been sort of had the pleasure of doing together with Mike. Mike is a real ninja at the telescope.

He's truly, truly phenomenal. But predominantly I kind of lead the theoretical side of the Planet 9 project, whereas, as he leads the more observational side of the project. So we've over the years diffused our duties quite a bit, but that division is still to an extent there. I'll be honest, I really enjoy theory a lot more. I find a real thrill in doing theoretical work that I just don't maybe resonate with as much

when we're at the telescope and staying up all night and not drinking, you know. Staying up all night and at a party is way more fun than staying up all night at a telescope. Or performing in your band. What's the name of your band? The name of the band is the seventh season. We're going to have, you know, we're going to be. As the Krispy Chicken Sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know.

Oh, I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold, I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby I'm a whole meal. And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet, no. Crispy, saucy, and $4?

Very. Only at 711. Valley 362326 participating stores only while supplies lastly out for full terms. Um, yeah, we're already kind of like the most overrated band. even though there is no critical acclaim, but it's going to be even more true in the coming months. I can't wait. I hope to see, catch you guys live,

and maybe I'll get a guitar pick thrown my way. The last thing I want to say about what you do on your daily basis revolves around, you know, this notion that all planets in the solar system, it's kind of old hat, Newton solved everything. If it doesn't involve Einstein or Schrodinger, who cares? It's not really cutting edge. Talk about the tools that you do use, the simulations of supercomputer. Talk about the tools that you use and where we're going technologically to hopefully

unravel the mystery and the existence of it, maybe even observe it directly or maybe by a spacecraft or something. Yeah. You know, I'm so glad you brought this out because this was my perspective as well before I got involved with solar system research. And I think it ties in very nicely with the common misconception. that 20th century physics and 21st century physics is basically just two things. Like it's either GR or, you know, or quantum mechanics in some advanced or like particle physics. You know, one of the, I think one of the coolest advances that unfolded at the end of the 20th century was really chaos theory coming into its own and becoming a big part of natural. science, as it turns out, the solar system is one of the best laboratories where long-term chaos manifests. And Planet 9 is a, and Planet 9, the outer solar system itself is not only not immune

from chaotic dynamics, all of this story is chaotic dynamics. Right. So when we are doing these simulations, we're not, you know, setting mv squared over R equal to GMM over R R squared and canceling the M's and one of the R's, right? I mean, this involves doing long-term simulations that are based on subplactic maps, which basically only give you a statistical estimate at the end of the day of what types of dynamical evolution planet 9 can instill, because each trajectory is just some chaotic, you know, whisper, if you will, of some chaotic sampling of the different dynamical modes.

So at the end of the day, you have to go, if you're, for this problem, especially you have to go to the supercomputer. And at times, just to basically have enough realizations of the model to really understand what's going on. So yeah, it's a remarkably advanced and really intriguing field. Now, when it comes to observations themselves, right, that's a field where the recent advances in machine learning have played a huge role as well. Right. I mean, the way that, the way you do image analysis these days is not Clyde-Tumbo style where you're trying to blink a couple of images and notice.

something that moved, it's AI doing that for you. And all of these advances truly have been interlinked. So we're getting some questions. Just a reminder, we're talking with Professor Constantine Batigen of California Institute of Technology, a small technical college on the outskirts of northern Los Angeles County. And we're discussing some of the implications of new simulations, a new paper that came out just yesterday, I think. It was embargoed and I got to really lucky break to get hold of Constantine to various means and modalities of communication, but we're talking about these really massive simulations and the tools and techniques of a theoretical planetary scientist, a person who's working at the boundaries of what technology

can do now. And people are asking questions, which I think, you know, you essentially answered, But you don't know what this object could be. It could be, someone's asking, could it be a black hole, a primordial black hole, somehow lurking on the outskirts of the solar system? And actually, none other than Edward Whitten has proposed such possibilities, maybe not for Planet Nine specifically or for this object specifically, but that there may be the possibility of a black hole. So you may actually get Constantine,

may actually get to have a brush with black holes and GR and all sorts of things that people would assume you might envy. But yeah, can you say something about that? Is there much excitement about that? Or is that kind of just a fanciful notion that isn't real? Well, look, I mean, so like I said, we don't know what it is. It could be anything, as long as it's five earth masses, a primordial black hole. Of course, you know, comes in a whole spectrum of masses, as you know, very well.

So that's one possibility. This has been pointed out in the literature, not by us, but by Unwin and Schultz, I believe, or maybe I'm getting the authors reversed. But, yeah, this has been, this is one idea that's out there. What's really remarkable here is just how different at the detailed level this whole calculation is from the one of Neptune. Neptune was discovered by seeing the gravitational effect it had on Uranus and deriving its existence that way.

In the case of Neptune, all you could really derive was its on-sky location and kind of the immediate on-sky path. Because Uranus and Neptune were a conjunction in 1846 when Laverier was doing the calculation. So in fact, Laverier and Adams both got the orbits of Neufathe. Neptune and the mass of Neptune wrong, but they got on-sky location right. The planet nine store is the polar opposite of that. You can, you actually can calculate the mass and the, in the orbit with some, you know, reasonable degree of certainty, but one thing you cannot know is where it is on its orbit and what it is.

Yeah, actually, Dan Green is a colleague of mine here at UCSD, was, commenting on Twitter yesterday. He was actually in Clubhouse a few minutes ago about these notions like what the greatness of Einstein was is that he had to accept things like, you know, relativity, but then overthrow it in favor of, you know, giving up the notion of simultaneity and instead focusing on things like the invariant interval. But whereas Laverrier, I think that's how he said his name, right, he discovered Neptune based on the, uh, the, uh, the, the perturbation to Uranus's orbit, but then he tried to do something and predict the aberrations of Mercury based on the existence of Vulcan. You want to talk a little bit about how brilliant

scientists can get things spectacularly right and then try to use that same technology, same tool, and get things, you know, blunderlingly wrong. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so Mercury, the transits of Mercury, the measurements of transits of Mercury became quite precise by the mid-1800s. So in parallel with the advancements of celestial mechanics at the time, it became clear that the orbit of Mercury is processing, right, and are rotating somewhat faster, and that's 43 arc seconds per century faster,

then would be predicted by the Newtonian law of gravity. So there are two ways. to resolve this problem. One is modified the law of gravity, right? That's certainly one way, which, of course, ended up to be the correct answer. And the other one is to fix it. The way you fix it is you put a planet close to the surface of the sun such that the sun basically becomes effectively obelate. That can give you a degree of procession that can advance. Mercury's per helion by the right amount. That was Leverier's prediction. Of course, it turned out to be wrong. But to give it to give Leverier full credit, right, that mystery, like recognizing that

mystery and solving that mystery and was part of that, part of the pyramid really that led to the success of, you know, of relativity. Because I think by by 1915, it had become somewhat clear that planet Vulcan was really not there. So this mystery was really amplified by Leveria's work. All right. Yeah, a reminder, we're talking to Professor Constantine Batijian. Earlier this week, we talked to Neil deGrasse Tyson, and in the past I've talked to Avi Loeb and Sarah Seeger.

And, you know, it would be really dereliction of my duty as a YouTube creator, as we called, as we discussed earlier today. If I didn't ask you about these three people, Tyson and also Avi Loeb and also Sarah Seeger, whose episode will come out hopefully in the next couple of weeks. Sheet, let's work backwards. Sarah Seeger and collaborators have a proposal that there might be a life evidentiary piece of molecule, molecular phosphine, which can be indicative of a biological process, operating on the clouds of Venus.

So first of all, how do you react to that? What do you make of that? I know it's not your field and it's dangerous, but even as a layperson, if you want, how do you react to that? What are your thoughts on that particular controversial new discovery? So my understanding of this,

and again, I've only followed that the phosphine story kind of peripherally. Now, my understanding was that when that story came out, right, there was an immediate kind of outcry about how the data, you know, can be fit in a different way. And that's a really important, you know, it's really important to be skeptical for discoveries like these because they're so monumental. And so the pendulum kind of swung into the phosphine is not there. but my understanding was that a recent reanalysis of some older data actually looks somewhat more favorable. Again, I'm not an expert in Phosphine. In any case, my overall sense is that life is just a contaminant on an otherwise interesting planetary surface.

But, you know, it's one of these things where it's really quite exciting that such work is being carried out. At the end of the day, if there is a hint in the data, if something interesting is going on, it's always, of course, worthwhile to ask the question. What are the pathways to produce this molecule naturally, right? What are the geological pathways to do this? And are the geological pathways reasonable if they are non? Or if they are, you know, if they,

require assumptions that are not, you know, not particularly, how should I say, not particularly realistic, then, you know, you go to life as an alternative hypothesis. It's interesting stuff, right? Yeah. And then next going, you know, reverse chronologically, I had Avi Loban, and he has this theory, which is that not only is there life in the galaxy, but there's technological life and advanced technological life that can send a solar sail-powered spacecraft to our solar system for purposes we don't know. But this is his contention at very high confidence level of it not being a fluke. In other words, the confidence that he ascribes to it is over 90%, which is not, you know, they're going to call up Stockholm. As the joke goes, you know,

With 3 Sigma, they'll invite you to give a seminar, but they won't pay you back. You know, at 5 Sigma, they'll pay for your hotel for one night. And then 7 Sigma, they'll take you to Stockholm to win one of these things, which, you know, maybe someday you'll have around your neck. But let me ask you, Constantine, what do you make of Avi Loeb's theory? Not him personally, but the theory itself on its own merits. Well, actually, I know Avi really well. I was, I mean, as a postdoc, my office was across the whole.

Paul from from Avi's so you know Avi of course has a remarkable amount of you know a remarkable amount of energy and you know I remember he ran into my office at one point and said you know I have figured this out like I was I was you know whatever cooking I think you're saying that and if he was cooking Thanksgiving dinner or he was helping his wife cooks at Thanksgiving dinner and He's like, I figured out that at one point, the entire universe was room temperature. Of course, it was, but he's like, imagine it. Imagine living in that universe, just everything is habitable. Just everything, you go outside, it's just room temperature, man.

Like, you know, it's just nice. It's like, I don't know. It's like the south of France in, you know, in April, right? just, so, you know, Avi has, has cool ideas. I think, you know, my, I personally ascribe to the, you know, the notion that life really should be a hypothesis of last resort because it's one to which, it's one that kind of opens up a huge can of warm. Let me also say one more thing.

The question of whether or not there is life elsewhere in the galaxy, for example, is a completely boring question. Of course there is life elsewhere in the galaxy. We at this point know that extrasolar planets are super common, right? There's just, there's in my view, negligible amount of probability, describe to the notion that somehow the Earth is a unique spot in all of cosmos where life emerged and everywhere else it didn't. The question of whether or not it's there, I think, is one that's answered. It's there. The real interesting question is, where's the closest life?

You know, where's the closest life? Is it in the icy satellites? And to give credit words due, this was something, you know, I changed my entire thinking of this as a consequence of conversation with Mike, you know, Mike Brown, because he was the one who pointed this out to me and I thought it made a lot of sense, right? Like, you know, is it Europa, are the oceans of Europa teeming with life or do we have to travel, you know, 100 parsecs before we encounter the first. the first life form. The question of Omoa is of course an interesting one, but let's not forget that the entire

story there is coming like all of this excitement is coming from a measurement of a light curve which goes up and down stochastically and non-gravitational acceleration. So that's where

the all that's the foundation of all of that debate. I think it's important to keep to keep that in mind, right? I think it, one way or another, we'll learn a lot more with LSST coming online soon. Yeah, absolutely. So we're going to finish up in the next few minutes so we can get some alcohol into Constantine. He's at a busy week. He deserves it. But there's a very important question coming in from Christian Ready, whose show you should go on called Launchpad Astronomy. My good friend Christian is asking a very important question.

What kind of bass guitar is behind you? Ah, yeah, so that's an Ibanez. That's an Ibanez. In fact, that one is not mine. It's from the bass player in the band. He made the mistake of leaving it in my office, and then COVID happened, so I've appropriated it. Pandemic base.

That's right. This is my pandemic base, My base is in, you know, is locked away in a room that I have no longer, I can't get into as long as there's COVID. So, yeah. Well, you'll have to wait to play the music of the spheres as COVID is on the way. And hopefully things will lighten up there in Los Angeles, in Pasadena, my old stomping grounds. Last couple of, last question for me before we turn it to the audience, there's a bunch of people over 110 on YouTube. people to subscribe and leave a comment if you'd like to see more like this and you'd like to see

more of Constantine you can find him on the web at his name. Constantine Bettegin, it's a little bit hard, but I put it up there. His Twitter is K. Batigin and it's B-A-T-Y-G-I-N. And not too many people have a name of my favorite alcohol in their name, but Constantine certainly does. So Constantine, I want to know where are we going in this field? It's going to take machine learning, artificial intelligence, And what's the next direction as a non-teloscopic astronomer? What are you most excited about coming in? More data. You mentioned the Rubin Observatory, LSST.

What are you most excited about as the next technological or scientific breakthrough in your specific field? Yeah. Okay. So for the solar system, for the outer solar system, of course, Vera Rubin is it. Not meaning that's the only thing, but it's going to be a huge. huge revolution. I spend quite a bit of time doing work on extra solar planets, right? That's a field that's very healthy and it kind of continues to, you know, gain traction.

I think that's another, there, you know, things like James Webb coming online, as well as a whole range, really, of missions, many of space telescopes, many of them in Europe, like Plato, you have coming online and providing swaths of new data. The generic story with exoplanets is that they keep, you know, of course, surprising us, right? There's stuff time after time, you know, they keep disproving what we thought was right about planet formation, which is great, right? Planet information is not a field, is not a theory with a lot of predictive power. It only kind of has retroedictive power.

And finally, you know, I've recently gotten involved in trying to understand how the satellites form, the Galilean satellites. Because as you mentioned, Galileo found them about four centuries ago. To this day, we don't actually know very well how they form, like the basic question of why they are there is an exciting one. And it's going to only get more exciting in the next decade because they're thinking. like Europa Clipper going to Europa. There is Dragonfly flying to Titan, which is the biggest moon of Saturn. There's an ESA mission called Juice, which is going to go and study Ganymed, which is the most massive satellite of Jupiter in excruciating detail. So whenever you have stuff like this happen, right? More, better telescopes, direct missions that tell you something about the geophysics of

you know, these bodies, it always brings together a wealth of new data, which crushes the old models and allows people like me to get, you know, excited and construct new models. So I, yeah, I really, really am looking forward sort of to the next decade. And I'm really not like sitting around hoping, you know, more data comes in. I'm excited about where planetary astronomy, broadly speaking, is going to be over the next 10, 20 years. Yeah, we have a question. Well, it's sort of a modification of Stewart Brands is saying cosmology, which is what I do, is a massive distraction, and it's a drain on resources. I'm going to turn that around. He's a little bit grouchy here.

Stewart, come on. Don't threaten my livelihood here, my friend. But I will ask the question. Would you take a one-way trip to Mars as upcoming guest, Andy Weir, who's coming on the Into the Impossible podcast very soon, wrote about in The Martian. It almost happened to the astronaut Wally. I want to know, would you take a trip to another planet to Sedna to Planet 9? What would you most want to see up close and put your astronaut boots onto it? Absolutely not. Just absolutely not. Yeah, I mean, I have very well-formed opinions about this. Like, I love the planets. Mars, I don't love as much as the other ones. But, like, you know, I love doing what I do, but I have absolutely no interest about leaving Earth. And furthermore, I think, you know, it's important to not have delusions about the Earth, none. being awesome the earth is the the only home as like i really feel this way you know we evolved on on this planet and we have uh millions of years of evolution which cannot be uh which cannot be kind of uh undone in a just because we we wish to explore now planet space exploration is

obviously super important. And I think having a manned mission to Mars, I think there will be one kind of in our lifetime. All of that, you know, is worthwhile, et cetera, et cetera. But I have, I think, you know, if we're talking about dedication of resources, et cetera, et cetera, you know, I view climate change and generically the destruction of ecosystem on earth as a far more important problem than any of this.

I don't think that we are going to be able to escape having to deal with large-scale, you know, large-scale deterioration of our life as we know it if we do not address or if we do not mitigate address to whatever we can. the issues that we have on Earth. I know this is a long way of saying, I'm not moving to Mars, but, you know, I have...

It's surprising hearing, you know, because someone who wants to obliterate the Kuiper Belt and destroy the Ord Cloud. Maybe that's just a demonstration of your awesome prowess. But I would have thought, you know, we destroy Earth, so at least we have some practice on Earth,

then we move out in the solar system, go to Mars, destroy that, and then we go out to the org cloud, and then finally we'll learn how to take care of ourselves. We have a question from Matt Fox, who is the memes of destruction on Clubhouse. He is asking to ask a question. We have Shereena Rice and Matthew Meleg.

I'm going to invite them up. They're going to ask you some quick questions, and then we're going to close out the stream. So Matthew, go ahead. You're on with Professor Constantine Bidjan of Caltech. I'm presuming Matthew here is talking about the outer solar system. The planet nine.

So planet nine. Yeah. Look, I mean, I think that both the best model and the most likely model here are kind of the same thing. I believe that what we're seeing are the gravitational effects of a distant, you know, five Earth mass planet that was being created together with, you know, maybe. Neptune and baby Uranus and then got in sort of scattered out by Jupiter and Saturn and had its orbit further modified by some effect, such as passing stars. And now we are seeing the kind of long-term billion-year accumulation of its gravitational potential. And we're kind of seeing that as the signature.

There are other explanations out there. I think that, you know, they are, you know, not. not necessarily completely implausible, they're just less likely. Last question, Clumhouse comes from Sharina. Sharina, and my sister is Molina Rice. She is in Greg Lawlin's lab at Yale. And she's working with tests to survey the whole sky to look for planet nine, looking at different speeds which a planet can move at different distances from the Earth.

So I'm wondering what other people's perspectives are on this kind of method to survey the whole sky, planet nine. This is Sharina and I am done speaking. All right. So the, if I understood the question correctly, the question was what other methods are there aside from tests to survey the entire sky? Tess is certainly, right, and to give context, Tess is a space mission, right? Which is predominantly looking for exoplanets, but you know, you can take advantage as a as Molina is doing, the fact that the pixels are actually quite big and you can shift in stack to kind of increase your signal to noise that way.

So that's certainly one way to do it. The other way to do it is ground-based. And this is why Vera Rubens is an exciting advancement that's coming up in the next few years where you just point a telescope up in the sky and, you know, start chopping, start collecting data. And of course, the Earth is nothing more than a spaceship that's going around on its trajectory, if you will. So, you know, eventually you cover a huge portion of the sky that way as well. There have been other near all-sky surveys as well. But in the visible spectrum in which I think, you know, which is kind of the best bet for planet nine,

I think Vera Rubin is a great bet, but it would be so much cooler if just, you know, we just found it in test data. I mean, that would be, that would be really fun. So, yeah, I'm really, really excited about the work that they're doing with tests. It's really, it's clever and it's cool, and, you know, I like it basically. I like it. Very good. Okay, everybody. I want to thank everybody for tuning into the stream and for joining us in Clubhouse.

Please do subscribe on YouTube, Dr. Brian Keating. If you have not already, I have wonderful guests coming up, including Sarah Seeger, as I mentioned, of MIT, the rival beavers on the East Coast to Caltech and Professor Batigens' beavers on the West Coast. Also, I have Stephen Pinker coming up. I have a conversation with David Pogue speaking about climate. change and the destruction of planet Earth. He wrote a book How to Survive and Prepare for Climate Change, which is a hopeful book. And I urge people to look into that. And so stay tuned.

We've been an amazing, wonderful guest on The Into the Impossible podcast. I am your fearful host during this time of pandemic podcasting. Signing off and thanking Professor Constantine Fidigian. I hope you'll join us again, Constantine. It's really so much fun to talk to you. Thanks. Thanks, man. We're all in love with your mind.

Keep it up, my friend. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishing from magic. Thanks for listening to Ended the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating.

exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at brian keating.com. And Do The Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating.