Ologies with Alie Ward - Smologies #1: THE MOON with Selenologist Raquel Nuno

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

Introducing… SMOLOGIES. Smaller, shorter, G-rated episodes cut from your favorite classics. Listen to Smologies in classrooms, around people whose language is squeaky clean, and in safe-for-work settings. You get bite-sized info in a jiffy, and I get to reserve my filthy language for our longer, regular episodes that drop on Tuesdays. In this episode, planetary geologist Raquel Nuno chats about when the moon formed, what its made of, how moon phases work, gravity, conspiracy theories debunked, the far side of the moon, lunar caves and why she pulls out the telescope to stare at the sky every night.Full, uncut, original Selenology episodeMore Smologies episodesRaquel Nuno's website and InstagramA donation went to the The Planetary SocietySponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Zeke Thomas Rodrigues & Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media and Steven Ray MorrisSmologies theme song by Harold Malcolm

Oh, hi. It's Small-Legies. This is the first ever episode. I'm Allie Ward. These are Small-Legies episodes delivering little tiny bite-sized brain snacks, little episodes that are refreshers on your favorites, and classroom friendly. All ages cuts of Allie's episodes that you love. So I hear it from folks every day I get messages, yo, Dad Ward, I see you have bleeped episodes, but what about making Allie's super family-friendly? Can you change your whole vibe for Small-Legites? I can't. I love you, but I love the way I get to make the full-length Allie's episodes that come out and land in your feed every Tuesday. But I did decide I can tweak what we have and release these clean, shorter edited versions as free bonus episodes so that when you see the Small-Legies

title, you know that you can listen with your kids and my parents. And Small-Legies are quicker, cleaner cuts of the back catalog favorites that are just perfect for my wheezy jog around the block or your dinner prep or anytime you have about 20 minutes to burn. And if you want the full scoop, all the juicy full episodes with more facts and backstories and words that we would not say around youngsters, you can find a link to that full version in the show notes. So with that, welcome to Small-Legies, which are dropping twice today as a little honeymoon break debut this week, just kind of an introduction to our podcast, Baby. And then Small-Legies will be out every other week on Thursdays as a bonus. So introducing Small-Legies number one,

selenology, a word that comes from the Greek selen for moon. So get ready to bask in the glow of selenologist Raquel Nuno. So what exactly would you say when you introduce someone and say what you do? What do you tell them? I tell them that I'm a planetary geologist. That's just what I say. And people usually have no idea what that means. They're like, I know geology. I don't know planetary. What does that even mean? So then I say, I'm a space geologist. I study rocks on other planets. And that's what I tell them. And then they lose their minds. And then they're like, what? Yes, that's what I do. So what does a space geologist necessarily do? So I say that I'm actually an armchair geologist.

So I sit on a chair and do geology. You're a reclining geologist. So we have samples from rocks in other worlds, but most of the time we don't. So I essentially use spacecraft data to analyze either images. I also do a lot of programming, so a lot of computational modeling of what's happening, surface processes that are happening in other worlds. And so you are crunching numbers and data to try to figure out what is happening with the rocks on other planets. That's right. That's what I do. That's crazy. Do you all of the planets or just a few of the planets? Just a few of the planets. So my two babies are the moon and Mars. So Raquel got her bachelor's in geophysics and space physics.

She got a master's in geology and she's now completing her PhD in geology and planetary science. This is all at UCLA. Do a lot of people tend to think that the moon is a planet? Okay. That if you'd ask a planetary scientist, they would say, yeah, it's a planet because it acts like a planet. It behaves like a planet, but it's just orbiting the Earth versus orbiting the Sun. So it's not in the true definition of what a planet is. It's not a planet, but we have to say planetary body because it's not technically a planet. So it's a planet if it's orbiting the Sun. That's right. How do you guys determine what's a planet? What's an exoplanet? What's a planetary body? I mean, a planetary body is not orbiting a Sun, but it could be orbiting another

planet. Well, a planetary body can be a planet as well. Oh, okay. So the Earth is a planetary body, but so are asteroids. Asteroids are planetary bodies because they're orbiting. They're in our solar system, so they're a planetary body. I feel like it's kind of like a not all not all succulents are cacti, but all cacti are succulents. Yeah, yeah, yeah, something like that. So you have to be round. So you have to have enough gravity to have formed a round shaped object. So there's a lot of asteroids that are they look like potatoes or like weird dumbbell things, and those are not could never be planets because they're not shaped like a planet is. So you have to have enough mass that you create enough gravity to round out your shape. You also have to have

cleared your orbit. And what that means is that there's no debris in front of your behind you. You have collected all of the the matter that's in your path to form yourself to form the the planetary body. I don't think I've ever realized that we're kind of like a Swiffer. Like that's part of where we get all of our stuff to make things is just by picking it up as we go. Yeah. So it's actually interesting. We Earth acquires a lot of mass just by traveling through space. And when you see like meteor showers that's us traveling through a trail of rocks of stuff that then encounters our atmosphere or that we encounter it and then they come crashing in a beautiful light shows in the sky. That's so exciting. Yeah. And have we always had the moon? So the moon

essentially so the moon formed very, very soon after the Earth did. So essentially when you're thinking about geologic time, yes, the moon has always been here with us. I talk to a lot of people and when I tell them what I do, oh, you're an astronomer. Like, no, I'm not, I don't, I'm not an astronomer. I'm a planetary scientist. I study rocks. And it's funny to think that a lot of the rovers, like all of the rovers that have gone to Mars, they're all robotic geologists. That's what they are. They're not astronomers. They're geologists. Yeah, they're not, they're looking down. They're not looking up, right? Yeah, that's right. Let's hot goss about the moon. Explain to me, where does this moon come from? Yeah. So the cool thing is actually we're not

100% sure, which is really, really cool. It's just how many science questions are still left answering. We don't know that much about the moon. There's still so much more to learn. But the idea is the prevailing, the one that most people think is the real thing that happened was that a Mars-sized object, which we call Thea, was just floating around space and crashed into the early Earth. And they collided and stuff kind of was flung out into space and coalesced to form the moon. When you look at what the moon and the Earth are made of, they're very similar. They look like they're made of the same stuff. So we think that that's what happened. These things collided. They mixed together. And then a big chunk of it got, or several chunks of it,

got flown into space and then eventually coalesced into what our moon is today. And it's gravity that's keeping it all together and into a ball. Yeah. That's how planets get bigger. You start out with little dust particles that are electrically attracted to each other, and they start getting sticking together. And everything has mass. Even a tiny dust particle has mass. And so it starts attracting the next dust particle. And then now you have little pebbles. And now the pebbles start getting stuck together. And then eventually you form a planet that's gravitationally bound to itself. So why on Earth aren't there more of these craters to which we can take road trips? Our atmosphere protects us from a lot of them. If the rock is

small enough, it'll just break up in the atmosphere. Whereas on the moon, there is no atmosphere. It'll just slam into the ground and it'll be left. And there'll be a hole there. And that's actually one of the cool things about studying the moon. The moon has experienced pretty much everything that the Earth has experienced. And because it doesn't have plate tectonics and it doesn't have an atmosphere, it acts as a witness plate to everything that the Earth has experienced. So that's why the surface of the moon is pitted. But what about the moon itself? Does it have a pit, like a peach? What's in the moon's core? Is it like a jawbreaker? Raquel says it has a core. It's just much smaller than the Earth's. One of the cool things that I

think when I think about the moon and the impact that caused it was there was so much energy that collected from that original impact that formed the moon that the entire moon was just a magma ocean. Yeah, just imagine the whole moon just magma. So that's the prevailing theory. Here on Earth, we have different types of rocks. We have igneous rocks, sedimentary rocks. Whereas the moon, it's essentially all that light stuff is just one thing. And the only way that you can form something like that is if it all just pretty much formed at the same time from the same stuff. And so we think it's just a big anorthosite crust, except for the dark regions that you see on the moon. And those are ancient volcanic plains. How big around is the moon comparatively? What's

the size difference between the moon and Earth? So if the Earth were to be a basketball, then the moon is a tennis ball. Oh, perfect. Done. Amazing. That's how I like to think. So the side nearer to us is actually the crust is thinner. So it's easier for lavas to bubble up. And so what you see when you look up, those dark regions were just ancient lava plains that flowed and found a low place on the moon and just settled there. And you can see more of those areas when the moon is full, which makes me wonder. How do moon phases work? Just like pretend I'm someone you met at the car wash. She doesn't know Jack about the moon because that's pretty much what's happening, but we're not at a car wash.

So the phases of the moon are caused by what we're seeing is where the sun is lighting the moon. So during a full moon, the sun is directly behind. If you were to be staring at the moon and it's a full moon, the sun would be directly behind you. But the reason that if you see the full moon and it's not an eclipse, it's because there's a slight tilt to the moon's orbit. So it's not perfectly in line with the sun. And so you see the sun lighting up the full face of the moon. Now when the sun, if you're again staring at the moon and you see only half of it lit, that means that the sun is either to your left or to your right. And when it's a new moon, when you don't see any light of the moon is because the sun is lighting the dark side of the moon, the far

side, what we call the far side. So it's always a full moon somewhere. It just depends on where you're hanging out. On where you're hanging out. That's right. It's only our perspective that makes the phases of the moon happen. How does the moon affect the oceans and maybe us? So the moon has a couple of effects on us. So it creates our tides. So high tide, low tide, that's from the, it's the moon and the sun. A lot of people think it's just the moon, but it's a combination of both. But the moon is stronger because it's, it's closer. So it pulls on our oceans, depending on where it is on the planet, which area, where on the planet it's closest to, it's going to tug on that part of the planet. So it's actually

tugs the rocks as well. It's not just the water, just the water, just easier to deform. Oh my gosh. So it's tugging. Yeah. So actually our earth is, yeah, our earth is slightly oblate because we have the moon tugging at it, the moon and the sun, of course. But then we tug at it. We tug at the moon as well. Oh man. I'm going to have galaxy brain break down right now. And the other way it affects us is we, it slows down our days. So the earth used to be spinning a lot faster than it used to be. But because of conservation of momentum, angular momentum, it has slowed down the earth's spin. So about every 100 years, we get 2.5 milliseconds slower.

And in 2012, we had to add a second to the world clock just to make up for it. Moon's like, I did that. Likewise, earth's gravity pulls on the moon, the moon slows down a little, and then the moon becomes what's called tidally locked. So its orbit around us takes 28 days, and its own rotation takes about 28 days, which means that it's daylight for over 13 earth days straight. Raquel explains, and as you will hear, this was news to me. How does the moon work? So the far side of the moon, what exactly is there? What's happening on the far side of the moon? More craters. Okay. Less lava, much less lava. Most of the lava, the ancient lava fields are here on the near side. Like I said, the crust is thinner,

so it's easier for lava to bubble up on this side. The far side, it's just like a much lighter color to the moon because it's mostly that anorthosite that I was talking about earlier, and lots of impact craters. Side note, so yes, the light side is on the dark side, which is really the far side. So the far side has tons of craters, and it's lighter in color, and so far, no alien communes. Now the near side is smoother and has darker splotches of basalt. Those are called mares because way back in the day, folks thought they were oceans. Now the mares are flatter, and they have fewer craters because it's younger terrain. So lighter parts, a north side rock called the highlands, the darker parts are basalt called the mares. Boom. So Apollo 16

landed on, went in the highlands at the lighter regions, but again, they tried to look for a place that was nice and flat, not a lot of craters because it's safer for the astronauts and for the lander to land in. And then Apollo 17 landed right on the edge between highlands and a mares because they were trying to sample the rocks from the two different places. How many times have we been to the moon? Six. We've been to the moon six times. Yeah. There's water there. Do you know that there's... Wait, there's water on the moon? There's ice, water ice on the moon. Yes, yes. Where is it? In these, at the poles, there's these craters that never see sunlight. They're so deep

that sunlight never actually enters the crater. So they have not seen sunlight for billions of years. Oh my God. And it's actually one of the coldest places that we've ever measured the solar system are inside these craters, colder than the surface of Pluto. No. Yes. How cool is that? Literally very, very cool. So chilly. Another reason the moon's cool is like there's lava caves. Do you know about the caves? No. There's caves on the moon. Do I look like I know about lava caves? Yeah, there's caves where we can set up human bases because they'll be shielded from radiation and from the cold and the heat because the sun heats up the surface a lot. So it's either very, very hot or very, very cold depending on if you're in the shade or in the

sun. How cold, how hot we talking? Oh man. In these permanently shadowed craters, you can get down to 15 degrees Kelvin. So zero Kelvin is absolute zero. And you can, I mean, this is just 15 degrees higher than that is very, very, very cold. So to put that in context with the thermometer on your porch or like your car's dashboard, daylight on the moon can get up to 260 degrees Fahrenheit. And at night, it's a brisk negative 280 Fahrenheit. That's 127 Celsius at its hottest and minus 173 Celsius when it's cold, which means if we do end up cramming ourselves into caves on the moon, we're going to need a lot of extra space just for scarves and parkas for the 13 Earth days of nighttime, also perhaps some flip flops and a hibachi for those long ass days and some sunscreen

made out of magic. It's funny because you think of the moon, I think of the images we see of the moon look relatively flat and everything looks so dark that it just seems, there's something like, it just seems very inert. Oh yeah. Like it must just be like tepid room temperature and everything very flat and that's just not what's happening. No, no, it's, it just wanders from hot, cold, hot, cold. And so then we need to, if we do set up bases there, we need to shield our astronauts from that. And I think caves are a good place to do it or maybe inside some of these craters. I mean, we started in caves here. Yeah, pretty much. That's a good point, right? Yeah, we should continue. This is like the way to continue human exploration and just find caves and go live in,

would you ever go to the moon if given the chance? My opinion changes often. Before I had kids, it's like, yeah, of course. And then I had kids and I'm like, they need me. They need me here until they are, they're self-sustaining. So like 30. Bring them to the moon. I would, I would be so happy if my kids became astronauts. I don't know why. Like it's, it's super weird because it's probably not the safest thing for them to do, but to explore, I don't know, to become exposed. There's something so poetic and beautiful about, you know, pushing the boundaries of what humanity has done and can do. Do her kids like the moon? My little, I mean, my, my, he's two and a half now, but I think ever since he was like a year and a half, he'll point to the moon and be like,

moon, moon. Because I think like every night I set up the telescope just to look at the moon, like almost every night. It's, I love looking at it and it doesn't get old. Every time I look at that eyepiece or through my camera, it's, it's just beautiful and I don't know, breathtaking to me every time doesn't get old. Do you have favorite craters or mares or highlands? I know the lingo now. Yeah, you're, you're in it. I really like Copernicus crater and Eratosthenes and the reason why is they, I think they pretty much set off the entire field of, of lunar science. So and how we study how things age and impact craters. So Copernicus crater is, is a bright, bright crater. So this is something we could talk about space weather. So if something

is fresh, it's bright. And as it's exposed to space weather, it darkens. So if you see something that's a crater that's very bright on the moon, it's a younger crater than something else. And the reason we knew this is because this, so this crater, Copernicus crater has these crater rays and crater rays are material that were ejected during the impact. You punch the ground and a lot of stuff comes up and then gets flown all over the place and creating these beautiful crater rays. And some of those crater rays went into another crater. So that's how we knew that stuff that was bright must be younger than the stuff that is darker because we have these rays that are going into these craters. So, and that's, that's how we call the superposition and a lot of

dating on, on planetary bodies, because we don't have samples from it get done through these crater counting and superposition principles of what is on top of something else. So is it kind of like a paint drippings? You can tell what's on top because of the splatter? Yeah, yeah, yeah, something like that. Yeah. And then we use samples brought back from the Apollo missions to sort of ground truth what we think the age of something is. So now you can create a curve of, of how many craters? What does that mean for age? Also, what's with this moon wobble that's in the news these days? Well, scientists in the 1700s discovered that the moon's orbit does a little bit of a wonky dip every 18.6 years. And for half of it, the tides are a little lower. And for the

other half, tides will be higher. So hunker down for that between 2030 and 40. Aren't we so thankful for planetary scientists so much that we're donating to some of the oligists choosing since Raquel says the planetary society is doing great work. Their CEO is Bill Nye and their mission is to introduce people to the wonders of the cosmos and to inspire and educate people from all walks of life. So you can learn more about them at planetary.org and that donation we made was made possible by the following sponsors. Okay, let's blaze through some questions. Are you ready for a lightning round? Yes. Okay, water, simple water. The answer is yes. Yes. You got this. Julie wants to know, do we ever know what's on the dark side? So there's a

spacecraft right now that's orbiting the moon called LRO, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and it has taken spectacular high definition, beautiful pictures of the entire moon. And you can go to their website and find pictures of the dark side, far side. It's not the dark side, the far side of the moon. The coolest thing is that I think those cameras have done, they've actually imaged the Apollo landing sites. So you can see the footprints and the rover prints that the astronauts left at the surface and like the lunar module and the rover, it's still, and you can see it. It's in the images that were taken by LRO, the cameras on board LRO. Christina Schoey wants to know, which theory on the origin of the moon is your favorite?

The impact theory that Thea hit early Earth and it formed the moon. And now here we are. And here we are. Lettia McGinnis has a question that I'm sure so many people do, which is, do the phases of the moon affect people's moods? You also worked a little bit in healthcare. I did. Through the Air Force. No, it doesn't because the phase, the moon is still there. It's not any closer or any further.

I mean, even if it does, like it wouldn't have an effect on us. It's just the sunlight. One Pedro Martinez wants to know, why don't we go back to the moon? I know. That's what I'm saying. We should. The moon is the next logical step, I think. It's right there. It's right there. We can set up bases. We can make things there. We can make fuel there. It's much less gravity, so it's easier to launch from there. It just makes so much sense to go to the moon and not Mars. It's harder to leave the Earth's gravity well, whereas it'd be so much easier to do that from the moon.

Renee Coley wants to know, who owns the moon? Nobody. So there is a space treaty that was signed. I don't remember the year. 1967. But it says that no one nation owns anything in space. Anna Thompson wants to know, what is the biggest unknown about the moon still? Or the coolest thing we've learned about the moon? Well, I think the biggest unknown is just how did it form? It's so similar to our Earth

and made it the same stuff. But you would think it'd be a lot more different, but it's not. And the coolest thing, I think there's water there. I think that's nuts. That's pretty cool. Bre Johnson wants to know, do you think there will ever be a time where humans can live on the moon and Lindsey K Trotter also asked, can we colonize this thing or what? Yeah, for sure. But I think that'll be more of a jumping ground. You might go to the moon first to acclimate or not acclimate in the sense of acclimate to the weather, but acclimate to living in a space environment or in not Earth and lighter gravity and...

How's the gravity on the moon versus Mars? A sixth. So you could jump pretty high. E Brown asked, I didn't even think of this question, how come you can sometimes see the moon during the day? So the moon is always orbiting us. So sometimes it's orbiting us when it's night time and sometimes it's during its daytime. So it's always either on our side during the day or on the other side. So it just depends on where it is on its orbit. What's the best thing about what you do or the best thing about the moon? The best thing is getting to think about these things that are so much bigger than myself.

It just takes me out of whatever is going on in my personal life or whatever is going on in the world, just focusing on something that is just out there and it's so much bigger than us and bigger than whatever is happening in our world is kind of like a vacation in a way of everyday problems and I think that that's what I love the most about it. And we love Raquel Nuno, selenologist and everybody's best moon friend and also a planetary geologist who has the word rock in her first name. It's amazing. So follow Raquel on Instagram and Twitter at the space geologist. Her handle is linked in the show notes. We are at allergies. I'm at Allie Ward with 1L and since this is a shorty episode, you can find all the credits of all

the amazing folks who work on the show in the show notes too and at alleyward.com slash smologies. Oh, one last thing before I go, some dad word life advice, which I will cap every episode with. So sometimes when you're tired or cranky, you're just thirsty. So if you're having a bad day, hydrate and see if that helps. Okay, go ask questions.