Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Saturn

Episode Date: April 25, 2022

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedy writers/podcasters Soren Bowie (‘American Dad’ on TBS, ‘Quick Question with Soren and Daniel’ podcast) and Daniel O’Brien (same podcast, and ‘Last Week Tonight With John Oliver’ on HBO) for a look at why Saturn is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Hey folks, quick message about this podcast, and I truly am going to keep it quick because there's a lot more written about it on the Patreon, but you're about to hear episode number 91 of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. That number has me thinking about episode 100. I'm doing a membership drive for the run-up to that humongous milestone for the podcast, episode 100. That means a bunch of new benefits for existing patrons, and especially for new patrons who jump in, who make this drive a thing that is fun and a celebration. Head to SifPod.fun for the full details, and I'll be talking about it again on, you know, further episodes of this podcast in the run-up to episode 100. In the meantime, holy cow, episode 91, you are going to love hearing about Saturn. Cow episode 91, you are going to love hearing about Saturn. Saturn, known for rings, famous for big rings.

Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Saturn is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. Soren Bui and Daniel O'Brien are my guests this week. Soren Bui is a writer for American Dad on TBS, which is an amazing TV cartoon show worth seeing. Daniel O'Brien is a writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which is an amazing TV current events comedy show worth seeing. And when they're not writing on those amazing TV shows,

the two of them co-host Quick Question with Soren and Daniel, which is a very fun, joyful podcast that I hope you please check out. You can also hear Soren solo on the episode of this show about the planet Venus. Very relevant. You can hear Daniel on an episode about Franklin Pierce, and you can hear them together on an episode about keys. I'm thrilled they're coming back yet again to do a whole nother topic that you folks teed up for them. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used Internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Acknowledge Sorin recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Wartongva and Keech and Chumash peoples. Acknowledge Daniel

recorded this on the traditional land of the Leni-Lenape people, and acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about Saturn, the planet Saturn. I think the planet Saturn is a self-explanatory topic. It's also a patron-chosen topic. Many, many thanks to Joey DeSterko for that suggestion. Also a lot of support from patrons like Itzyar in the polls there. So please sit back or sit in eager anticipation of the next probe after Cassini-Huygens. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Soren Bui and Daniel O'Brien. I'll be back after we wrap up.

Talk to you then. Sorin, Daniel, it is so good to have you again. I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. How do either of you feel about Saturn? Oh, here we go. Go ahead, Dan. Don't care for it. Go ahead.

Don't care for it. So I don't, I'm not very interested in space. I don't think it's as exciting as everyone else who cares about space does. That is like my resting place was I'm not interested. It's none of my business. And over time, that has really ballooned into like a full on dislike of space. It started off as kind of a bit. And when I moved to California, I made a bunch of friends very quickly. Abe Everson, Michael Swaim, Matt Bars, a bunch of their bunch of old crack people, and they loved space

and they were talking about it so much and I just snapped one day where I was like, every time you guys talk about space, you talk about it for too long and I feel left out and I'm gonna direct that anger at space itself. I don't like it. We should stop exploring. We're spending too much money on space and not seeing anything come back from it. So space is dumb. The ocean is better.

And Saturn, I'm sorry to say, Saturn, that you're in space and space is for dorks and garbage. So I don't like you. This is possibly the two worst people you could have on for this podcast because Dan hates space so much and i know everything anything that humanity knows about saturn i know so uh there's really nothing that you're going to be able to teach me so it's like the the very ends of the spectrum and we're just going to probably fight the whole time i will yeah you will not win dan over on space but i will certainly get mad at him about not even trying. Can I get everyone to agree on this podcast that we're spending too much money on space exploration? No, stop, stop. That's not...

All right. Although I do, like, I think we should go out and explore space. And I think it was First Man, that movie about Neil Armstrong. There's a run of clips in it of people at the time saying we were spending too much money on space. And one of the main clips was Kurt Vonnegut saying that it's a waste of time and that we shouldn't do it. That was a real, real tone shift for me in that movie.

I was like, oh. He wrote Sirens of Titan, right? He was supposed to be a Saturn boy. It's a moon of Saturn. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, because I think I trend Soren's direction on my feelings on space, but, uh, you know, I see why people are not into it too. So. Yeah. Let's see if this is regional

or not. What was everyone's mnemonics for remembering the order of the planets? Oh, I don't think I had one. Did you have, oh no. Yeah. Just, it was also intuitive because space was so cool. Uh, it was just like, oh, it's easy. Yeah. It's like Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars. Keep going. Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune. No, sorry.

Uranus, Neptune. And then whether or not you believe in it, Pluto. Right. Yeah. Whether it's part of your religion. It's belief. I see. We had, I think ours was my very educated mother just sold us nine pizzas

oh okay i'm stunned i didn't have one or i just missed it i don't know that you would think it's like it's like roy g biv for a rainbow or whatever you would think they would give that to me immediately right they had to give it to us because they're like this space is so stupid and boring we gotta make it exciting let's bring pizza let's bring mom into it to make it feel like closer to home a little bit just something to get these kids but like it's the weird capitalist angle to it as well that the mom is is like hucking pizzas to children yes yeah and if she didn't go to school no pizza no solar system no everything collapses we all die in the vacuum of space hungry yeah but yeah it's and it's saturn is like so far out there which everyone knows but like i feel like

none of us tangibly come into contact with it like it's really a choice to be into it or not into it you really have either option yeah you do you do. I'll, I will say that, that, uh, you know, that we just ended a period of time when Saturn's like in our sky for a while at night and it's close. And there was a, I, this is going to be such a long podcast for me. And I, I, there's a, I, we were in Tucson and the guy had a telescope. He's like, you guys, you want to look at Saturn? We're like, yeah, sure. And I looked in this, in this telescope and i was like surprised that i could see the rings in the telescope cool i mean i know that it has rings and i know that like if you if you went there you would see them but like i it didn't occur to me that you could actually see

the rings from earth it looked very fake it looked like a diorama almost it was very silly looking because it has it's like exactly how it looks in in movies. Yeah, it might be the most famous looking planet, if that makes sense. Like all the other ones are just orbs. But Saturn is like, hey, you know, like it's doing a little ring show. I feel like I could I could pick Earth out of a lineup. That's true. I don't know.

I'm not so sold in. I think maybe you'd get confused with Neptune pretty easily. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I'm realizing, like, in real time, oh, Saturn is the one with rings. This isn't a bit at all. I genuinely, I knew one of them had rings. I thought it was Jupiter. How far back can you start, Alex?

one of them had rings. I thought it was Jupiter. Yeah. How far back can you start, Alex? And also from researching this, I learned that several other planets in the solar system have rings, including Jupiter. They're just a lot fainter and a lot less distinctive.

Uranus probably has the most prominent ones that are not Saturn's, but Jupiter and Neptune do too. I didn't know that. Are are we gonna find out on this show what the rings uh do uh pretty much yeah yeah sick all right cool i'm on board well and i think we can get into numbers and stats and pave the way yes and on every episode our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Numbers with Stats They Have Sung for a Thousand Years. That's all.

I didn't know that you could sing, Alex. That was really good. Some vibrato at the end there. Really tight stuff. This is great. I had a question. Has anyone ever submitted that one song that's like do-do-do-do-do-do

math! Like, instead of a sale, you sing math or stats. Has someone done that? That would be my submission. Maybe I'll just lift that out of this, put it in the next one. You know, like I'll just pop it over. Linda, I am this name this week. It was submitted by Kathleen Estrada. Thank you very much, Kathleen.

We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make it as silly and wacky as possible. Submit to Sip Pot on Twitter or to Sip Pot at gmail.com or perform one directly while you're guesting. That's always a way to do it. It's also an option. But there's just a couple numbers here. The first number is two. And that's two is because Saturn is the second largest planet in the solar system. The

biggest one is Jupiter. And National Geographic says Saturn is about 10 times as wide as Earth. But despite that size, it's the lightest planet by weight. It's mostly made of hydrogen and helium, which are very light elements. And overall, on average, the planet is less dense than water. So theoretically, like if you put it in a big bathtub, it would float. It would not go down. What do you think, Dan? It's pretty fun. I think a couple of things.

I don't think it's a good idea for us to do this podcast with video on because when Alex says something that Soren already knows, he nods. Just wait. It's going to get worse. I'm going to start closing my eyes when I'm like, yeah. Like I just tasted something really good when he tells me a fact I already know. I'm like, yes, I'm familiar. But the middle, the core is pretty heavy though, right? It's like, it's metal.

Oh my God. Yeah, the core. There's rock in it and ice in it. And we'll get later into what we've learned about like how that's metal. Oh, my God. Yeah, the core. There's rock in it and ice in it. And we'll get later into what we've learned about how that's structured. Because it's a gas giant. There's a lot of gas to it. But it turns out those can be kind of solid. And Saturn exploration is part of how we know.

He's so happy. I'm so pleased. Yeah, sorry. That's hard to translate. He's so joyful. I'm pretty excited about talking about saturn well also because this one's a patron pick i'm pretty sure there was specifically enthusiasm about soren getting to talk about a planet and yes so well i just don't know what's like

what i get so i know as soon as you start talking about things and and like the it's a gas giant like what what the atmosphere is made of and everything i'm like oh oh i have things i want to say but i also know that you're going to get to a lot of it so i'm just like trying to trying to keep my mouth shut about the color why is that color in there let's just do it you're doing great this is how it goes when the the next number here is 82 i know this one god almighty let me guess let me guess this one for it yeah that's how many known moons there are around the planet yes but they're only 50 of them are named yes there's also a couple of moonlets dan we just don't know how many money that could be like as many 150 moonlets we don't know what makes it a moonlet it's just really small yeah it's just a

small piece of pulling around saturn and then um my other question who like uh gives it nobody literally nobody that's why they stopped counting like they stopped naming them they were like they got to like 50 and they were like oh yeah there's so many let's just give up aren't there uh very specific rules for how things get named in space or am i making that up does anyone know nasa's page says everything's orange so they're 53 confirmed and named moons the other 29 are awaiting confirmation and official naming, but they have a set of mythological groups that they're taking names from.

It's Norse mythology, Gaelic mythology, and I think Inuit mythology are like teed up for us to get new names for Saturn moons. Is it becoming evident why I like space so much yet, Dan? Are you seeing a cross-section of my interests?

A little bit, yes. The mythology stuff, huh? That's cool. Yeah, deep. Deep in Norse mythology, Greek mythology. Oh, oh. And I guess now Roman because Saturn. Yeah.

And the other quick thing to say about all these moons is some of the moons of Saturn are what are called shepherding moons. And shepherding moons are moons that are traveling in an orbit right above or below where the rings are, because the gravity of those moons is kind of helping hold the rings in place. So Saturn has that going on. Like some of its moons are part of what makes the rings look the way they do. Really? Oh, so that's why they're flat. It's not just orbiting crazily around it? Like a neutron, I mean like a proton or something? It's like it all is flat because of the moons?

Yeah, they're kind of holding it in place there, their various orbits. He's speechless. These are very cool. I'm just thinking about it. He's looking at like, I guess he's looking at space. No. Well, what you're seeing me look at is things in my garage. Oh, a hedge clipper.

But it all, the rings are a lot more geometric than you would think. Like it's a very, very wide, very, very flat kind of disc shape. And these many, many moons around it are part of why. What happens if one touches the ring is it a solid thing that i can clap grab onto take bite of get cut by oh what is it what is the ring the you know i think from here we can tell your angriest student we'll uh we'll go into the big takeaways from, because that gets into where the rings come from and everything else. And the last number leads us into it. The last number is September 15th, 2017.

And September 15th, 2017 is the last date of the Cassini-Huygens probe mission. It was a probe sent to Saturn, and they crashed it into Saturn on that day. That's the last day it collected data. But that brings us into takeaway number one. Almost everything we know about Saturn is new information. It turns out basically everything we know about the planet is from one recent probe mission called Cassini-Huygens. And before that, we knew very, very, very little about this planet. And we were all happier because of it. The world was better.

Gas prices were lower. The best America could be. This was a probe. It's called Cassini-Huygens. It launched in 1997. It spent seven years traveling to Saturn and then looped around it for 13 years. They only expected to get about four years of readings and they got 13. But this is basically the entire episode is going to be stuff we either found out from this

probe or that this probe like confirmed expanded on, told us more about because before that it was very very hard for people to know anything about saturn what so what it was like before the voyagers went to saturn because both of them went by saturn what did we do we know anything like other than we can look up in the sky and see all that things got rings like what did we know yeah so that's right both uh both voyagers went by after flying by jupiter and then before them, there was a probe called Pioneer 11 that flew by in 1979. And we knew so little about Saturn at that point that Pioneer 11 discovered multiple new moons and also a whole new section of the rings. And before those probes, we had astronomers looking from Earth starting in the 1600s. And they didn't really know much

about it. Before them, the Greeks and Romans thought Saturn was a star. Telescopes revealed it was a planet. Also, the astronomer Galileo did his first recorded observations of Saturn in 1610. He described it as, quote, not alone. And he said, quote, I do not know what to say in a case so surprising so unlooked for and so novel and quote what he was describing was the rings he was like freaked out by the rings because he'd never seen anything like that and couldn't understand it yeah that's pretty cool i feel like though at that at some point he's probably just fishing for new things to say. He's discovering so frigging much. He's like, oh, it's another, oh, oh. Guys, I don't even know how to describe it.

It's not alone. It's got, let's say, it's betrothed. No, that's not good. Let's see. It's not alone. That's it. It's not flying solo. It's not going stag.

It's not alone. That's it. It's not flying solo. It's not going stag. It's married. It would just be so shocking to see something not round up there, right? Like you see all these stars and planets that just look round, and then this one has a disk around it. You'd be like, okay, that's aliens or something, clearly. The Stinks, I found aliens. Yeah. The Stinks. I found aliens. Yeah.

And then Saturn was observed more, and people kind of found out that there were moons there and rings there over time, especially in the 16 and 1700s. And two key astronomers were Giovanni Domenico Cassini and Christian Huygens. And so the two of them are the namesakes of the Cassini-Huygens probe that really started getting us very solid information by orbiting Saturn starting in the 2000s. Because the previous probes just flew by after doing Jupiter stuff and on the way to the rest of the universe. Of those two, Huygens really lost the name lottery there. Yeah. That first guy sounds awesome. Give me the whole name again. Domenico Cassini? Giovanni Domenico Cassini.

Ooh, yeah. Yeah, hell yeah. Yeah, that's a name to f***. That's a good one. He was Italian and he moved to France, so I think he tried to find an even bigger party, probably. It's pretty cool. But yeah, and then this probe it was jointly launched by nasa and the european space agency and the italian space agency and in 2017 they made a joint decision that the probe was out of thruster fuel and so it was time to do a controlled descent of the probe

into saturn's atmosphere and blow it up. And part of why they decided to do that is because they didn't want the probe to crash into one of Saturn's moons and contaminate the moon with Earth life and Earth stuff. But apparently they got unprecedented information for the whole mission because it was circling Saturn like nothing had before. But then particularly interesting data as they dove into the planet and crashed it. Pretty cool, huh, Dan? Sorry, why do we give such a big hot s*** about this moon that we can't contaminate

with? That seems like it would be, it's got too many moons to name, so we can contaminate one of them, right? That seems like the most interesting option is contaminate a moon with Earth stuff. Why not? Well, it's just too early is the problem. You can't answer it. We want those moons.

We want those moons, Dan. They're like, we're covetous of those moons. Yeah. Why? Yeah. And the whole bonus show will be about two of them, one called Titan and one called Enceladus, because both of them have... Oh, it's not pronounced enchiladas?

It should be. I've only ever seen it written. Looks like it's written as enchiladas. But yeah, and especially those, they were concerned that there might be life there. So if we slam a probe into it from Earth, that could mess with the life. And we'll talk about that in the bonus. Both of those might have life on them. Which is very exciting to one of the two guests.

Come on, dude. We set a shuttle up there. We went around the planet for as long as we were like, yeah, we get it now. And then, so the aliens couldn't get their hands on our technology. We were like, yeah, we get it now. And then, so the aliens couldn't get their hands on our technology, we were like, let's f*** our own ship up. And we blew it up in the atmosphere of Saturn.

We were like, send it down to the planet. Let's crash it. I can't think of anything more interesting than introducing Earth life into Saturn moon life so they can f*** and then make a third kind of thing.

Wouldn't that be interesting? Wouldn't that be more interesting than just blowing this thing up? Right. We're creating life. Right. We have a probe. They have green women. And so if we combine those two things.

What did we learn? What did we learn? What did we learn when we crashed it? In particular, in the run-up to the crash, Cassini did many, many flybys right near the rings. And that was several years ago now, like the mid-2010s. But we are still crunching that data and figuring out what it means. And one of the most amazing discoveries is we finally figured out how long a day is on Saturn because they did it by measuring like wobbles in the rings. And it, it turns out it's like extra hard to measure the length of a day, which is just one rotation of a planet when the planet is a gas giant, because then you don't

have solid landmarks like mountains and continents and craters and stuff to track as it comes around. And so until really recently, they just had some like loose estimates of how long a day is on Saturn. How long is a day on Saturn? The estimate is 10 hours, 33 minutes, 38 seconds of Earth time. I knew I was going to hate that answer. That's pretty short. So it's spinning pretty fast. Yeah, less than half an Earth time. I knew I was going to hate that answer. That's pretty short. So it's spinning pretty fast.

Yeah, less than half an Earth day, yeah. But their year is super long. It takes them forever to get around the Earth. I mean, around us. Around the sun. Planets, all the planets revolve around me and where I am. I mean, technically, yeah. We're those popes who hate Galileo. Ah, we're so mad.

Copernicus is a jerk. Ah, we can't stand him. Yeah, because the Saturn year, I got to link the exact amount, but it's about 30 Earth years. 32. And yeah, and then in order to figure out how long a day was, what they had to do is measure the wave movements in the ring of Saturn, because it turns out that seismic activity on the planet shakes out to the rings, counted backwards from the wave movements in the rings

to figure out how the planet is moving and figure out how long a day is. See, now we're getting into math and i'm losing interest i'm notoriously not good at math no but you you were correct in how long uh saturn year is and the the smile on your face after you said it i could i have you ever just like watched someone not absorb information you said 32 years and then smiled and then sang a song in your head while schmitty valiantly barreled on trying to teach you something new i was i was out on a victory lap and i came back and he had gone on to something else. And I was like, oh, I'll miss this part. That's fine. Because, yeah, we we also found out by basically crashing a probe into it a lot more about how it works and probably all gas giants work because it has a core that is much larger than they previously thought. It has some solid rock and ice in it, some crystals of ammonia.

And it turns out it has like the equivalent of earthquakes. And according to planetary scientist Christopher Mankiewicz, quote, Saturn is always quaking, but it's subtle. The planet's surface moves about a meter every one to two hours, like a slowly rippling lake. And then like a seismograph, the rings pick up the gravity disturbances and the ring particles start to wiggle around. So we just learned Saturn is like always earthquakes and wobbling all the time. I do want to go there now just for like the smugness of being a very Earth-centric person who's like, oh, man, you got crazy earthquakes here. And they're like, we don't we don't call them that. Like, no, no, no.

These are earthquakes. Saturn's got earthquakes. we don't call them that like no no these are earthquakes yeah again i'm that pope who doesn't like galileo we're at the center baby we're doing it does that mean that it has a molten core if it's getting if it's having earthquakes like what's causing our earthquakes it's just tectonic plates touching each other and that's but that's like on a surface of like liquid right yeah so is it the same for them yeah them it's it's at least an active core i don't know if it's molten or not but apparently also the boundaries of the core are kind of fuzzy like there's just a point where it starts being liquid or gas and that sort of shifts around because they're not like us where there's a solid crust and more of a defined shape right

you just go right it's a it's a it's a big hairy deal that there's ice right or am i is that not not shocking or huge for some reason like my my very again i try not to learn anything about space it's not my business it's not interesting but it seems like one talking point that comes up a lot is we are excited to find like water on Mars or water somewhere else because that means, I don't know, there could be life somewhere else. Is that? Yeah. Am I wrong about that? You're right.

So is it a big crazy deal that there's ice? It's funny. So Saturn has a little bit of ice in its core, but then one of its moons, Enceladus, has tons of water. It's just an ocean planet. And so I think between that and Saturn not being solid, that's why we're not so stoked about Saturn having water. It's in there, but not a big thing. Geysers of ice crystals, Dan. Like Yosemite, like Old Faithful, but it's just ice shards coming out of it.

Just all the time. Sorin, shut up. I want to hear about the water planet. We have an ocean planet? It's an ocean moon, and I think I'll just keep saving it for the bonus. It'll be the bonus show. Okay.

Yeah. That's tight as shit. It's enchiladas. Very easy name to remember. With these gas giants, they have so many moons. The fact that two of Saturn's are so interesting is still amazing, you know? Like, many of the other moons are just rocky, and there's nothing going on from our Earth life-centric perspective. But a lot going on around Saturn.

Yeah. Something, something rocky. Something, something Apollo. That's a space thing, right? Yeah. You're doing, yeah, this is good. Yeah. The space race, Russia, Rocky IV.

Yeah. I like this area a lot. And Schmitty, you can edit this into a joke. Yeah, sure. Use that laughter after it. That was a good one. We all laughed. That was good. Off of that, we are going to a short break followed by a whole new takeaway.

I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast,

The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Well, since we're so interested in them, let's get into the other main takeaway for the main episode.

It's about the rings of Saturn. Takeaway number two. On an astronomical scale, we are lucky to be alive while Saturn has rings. Disagree. It turns out the rings of Saturn are pretty new and are also going away. So we're around kind of at the peak of the rings of Saturn. How long until they're gone and Saturn is out of my news feed? He's setting you up.

He's setting you up, Alex. He knows that the answer is hundreds of years and he's going to be gonna be like well then why the it doesn't matter that we're alive it is it'll take about 300 million years so yeah it'll be well you're right we are so lucky just god almighty so blessed how did we get this chance took out his switchblade and started carving his name to the back of the desk. He just lost interest in whatever you're saying in the back of the class. Because this is something we did learn from the Voyager probes, which is that the rings of Saturn are relatively new. The main source for this is an amazing piece for the Atlantic by Marina Koren. It's called The Long Goodbye to Saturn's Rings. And she talks about how when the Voyager probes came, they learned that

the rings of Saturn are between 10 and 100 million years old. Previously, people thought it was multiple billions of years with a B. But the Cassini mission affirmed that they're somewhere between 10 and 100 million years old, which on an astronomical timescale is really recent. For comparison, Earth's dinosaurs went extinct about 66 million years ago yeah dinosaurs all right should we should we pivot how do they know what i mean they went there and they were like they looked at the rings and like yep those are new how did they how did they know i don't really understand how they knew yeah i think they just took like readings of the age of the materials in them somehow i'll but i'll link more details about it yeah but they the old estimate was because they thought

the rings formed at the same time the rest of saturn did yeah and so they just found that it was a much newer material than the rest of the planet. Interesting. It's pretty interesting. So where are they going? Like, they're just dispersing out into space? It's just shooting clusters of rocks out into space? They're actually, they're going in toward the planet.

And it turns out. Oh, they're burning up in the atmosphere. What happens is there's, yeah, there's a combination of either incoming meteorites or the sun's radiation. But both of those things disturb the dusty pieces of ring matter and then those electrify and when they electrify they change spiraling change to a different path and then end up burning up down into the atmosphere of the planet and astronomers call this ring rain and they say in about 300 million years these rings will just rain away they'll rain into the planet oh yeah that's pretty cool it's gonna be a big day for saturn and then as far as where they came from marina corin quote the science community hasn't come

to a consensus about the origin story of saturn rings, but if the rings are indeed cosmically young, scientists say they probably formed when one of Saturn's moons drew too close and was shredded to bits. End quote. By the planet or by another moon? They think by the planet, yeah. So the rings are probably a former destroyed moon of Saturn that just is suspended around it in rings.

That's like, oh, that's so rad. But we don't know for sure. All that f***ing money we spent and we don't know for sure. I can't believe you can be mad about this. Saturn is essentially wearing the skulls of its enemies around its neck. Just like walking around. They're like, look, this is when I f***ed up. You're mad.

Can't believe it. I never want to know the price tag we got an epic team up of nasa italy nasa and that other european nasa all working together that's global taxpayer money and and we throw a thing at the planet we're like hey we it's we think it might be more moon that's our best answer i know it sounds like we're panicking and like all of our answers are probably moon but it's we think you know you know how we could how we could know for sure? Another $100 billion of taxpayer money, please, so we could fire some other space garbage at it. A probe we can't even have back now. Yeah, we don't get it back, it's true.

The concern is that we didn't get it back. Yeah. We could have used it again. It basically brand new it'd been on one mission yeah yeah like it's got a little gear shift on it you just go reverse and then it just comes back which is you just tie a rope to it when you send it and then just bring it back you're gonna need those parts again wheels if it's got wheels we're not gonna we're never gonna turn a corner on wheels we'll always need i'll tell you now dan it doesn't have wheels on it i mean your point is taken but yeah that's that's like a

child's understanding um, but yeah, we're at a, we're around for like maybe the peak of Saturn's rings. They're less than a hundred million years old and they'll go away at another 300 million years. And if you're an astronomer, that feels like a very short amount of time. So it's pretty cool.

And spread that tax money out over that time it's nothing basically nothing free pro pretty much your upfront cost I do want to time travel 300 million years into the future to talk to some sucker

who doesn't even get a Saturn with rings yeah whatever the future equivalent of me is who looks up at space with no wonder or awe and I was like buddy you didn't even get a Saturn with rings. Yeah. Sounds like whatever the future equivalent of me is who like looks up at space with no wonder or, uh, and I was like, buddy,

you didn't even get the good one. Can you believe it? You got this shitty one. Yeah. You got, can you, as much as space sucks, you're getting the low rent version.

I'm so sorry. Cause also like if, if the end of dinosaurs was 66 million years ago basically every dinosaur wasn't around for saturn's rings and we can see those bones in museums and stuff you know like we have plenty of things on the earth that are older than those yeah but they wouldn't have seen it anyway alex because they didn't have telescopes we don't think it's true all and t-rex's little arms like you can't operate it you know you can't can't reach nothing yeah real tough to pivot a telescope when when you're

looking through it and you have those little arms i don't think the dinosaurs would have even given a about space if they could see it with their stupid telescopes because dinosaurs are cool they're they're hard working they were focused they're not going to get distracted by space yeah by some let's say in the moment a big asteroid or something that comes down towards them they got no time for that they're busy hunting for ferns or whatever they ate yeah no yeah hunting for ferns. And also with astronomical stuff, in reading about Saturn's rings, the Atlantic talked to James O'Donohue, who's a planetary scientist at Japan Space Agency. And he says that the moon or possibly a comet that formed Saturn's rings was probably very small. And he says a thing which is freaky to think about but he says that if earth's moon

was destroyed right if it was blown up it could fashion thousands of ring systems like saturn's so it doesn't take like very much moon material to make these humongous rings that you can see from an earth telescope today do the do you know if the if um saturn's moons cross each other's orbit at all like do they have the potential to run into each other? There's so many of them. I get the sense not. It didn't come up in the research or anything. Because that'd be very exciting if they could.

Yeah, it feels like there's so much going on around it. It's like all that pollution around it. But it's still pretty cool that it can absorb. So, like, what would happen? Is our moon getting closer to us? Is that ever even, like, a potential for us that we would absorb. So like what would happen? Is our moon getting closer to us? Is that ever even like a potential for us that we would just, earth would eat the moon?

Sort of a, a moonfall situation. If you will. Dan, don't tell me anything about moonfall. I can't watch it till 2024. Wait, why? I can't,

I don't watch movies until they've been out for like three years. That's just nature of my life. Yeah. he has to hope that he's on a plane somewhere i actually so in the process of this i learned that earth's moon is actually slowly moving away from the earth we're gonna lose it like it's a very tiny amount. It's just by inches per year. And apparently most moons and satellites do this. They slowly move away from the larger body thereby. Soren, this is great news for our screenplay, Moonflea. I've always said, be like Saturn. If you like it, put a ring on it.

Keep it around. Good God. Let's see if that works. Hold on. Let me think of that now here's what's now it doesn't work no did that uh really just come to you yeah okay cool well sorry is there other put a ring on it saturn jokes in pop culture that i've? No. Oh, okay. No, but it was injected into the podcast so inorganically with so little grace that I was like, oh man, he must've been sitting on that for a while waiting for an opportunity.

Decided not to wait for an opportunity and just plopped it in here. But we were in the potential. We had the potential you're going to lose our moon. And I was saying, we don't want to lose it. lose it yeah be like i don't put a ring on it but really you're putting a ring on saturn which doesn't yeah it doesn't translate i'm gonna you know what alex edit that one and make it funny yeah i do it with everything i say so So, sure. Yeah, I get to loop that into the workflow. And also, with Earth's moon moving away from the Earth, apparently the sun will go supernova and die before the moon would fully detach from orbit with Earth. So there won't be an ultimate moon-flee moment. It'll just be the whole Earth and the solar system is destroyed.

Okay. We won't have to figure stuff out without a moon. Yeah, yeah. You're saying we're not going to have to wake up one day and adjust and like, oh, we got to make the tides ourself now. Yeah. The only way would be if a huge meteor destroys the moon or something. So everybody's long-term planning. Just factor that in.

uh but uh and yeah then as far as like saturn's rings going away according to linda spilker who's a planetary scientist at jet propulsion laboratory for nasa saturn could generate new rings after the current ones dissipate like if uh if another moon breaks apart or a comet goes into saturn's orbit and breaks apart like they might get new rings or build onto those or a second set. We have no idea. Would you be willing to spend all that money that we spend on space travel if we sent something up there to just push a moon into Saturn?

Yes. So we got a bunch of new rings. I am for space exploration that does something stupid or cool. Yeah. Leave some consequence. Like landing on the moon was a really great move.

I think that's neat. Yeah. And we're not, we don't think there's any life on Saturn. We're not going to destroy any ecosystems. I mean, or we can, and I, and we can just decide not to care about it. We can say there are lots of planets. We're going to, we're f**k up one of them we're gonna see what happens if we push a moon into saturn to give it crisscross rings this time oh yeah if we if we do it so it's like

yeah like jimmy neutron sideways in an up and down one yeah yeah i would be fine with that spend all of my money spend all of uh italy nasa's money denaro yeah this this mission is like recent but still old enough that i believe there's still a separate italian space program but there wasn't really a european union yet so that is one of the big italian space achievements is what we know about saturn it's sort of like when long ago soren and i did the venus episode we found out the russians like really really did a bunch of probes to Venus. Like the Soviets really worked hard on that. Nobody talks about it.

And the Italians, Saturn. Good job. When do we get to ask questions, Alex? Oh my God. Anytime. Yeah. What are, are there storms? Where are those white storms?

Where are those white storms all over Saturn that happen like once a year? Yeah, that's another Cassini thing they found out a lot about. And it's, I think, particularly at the poles of Saturn. There are storms that are sort of like a massive endless hurricane. There's one called the Great White Spot. And yeah, gas giants just seem to have this going on. Like Jupiter has a huge great red spot and not very solid. So no one's trying to land on them, but they're very chaotic places

weather-wise. Do they rain diamonds? Oh, I don't know. I don't know about that. Oh, there's, I heard that on planets like Jupiter and Saturn, it's possible that they have like diamond storms. Oh yeah. I missed this in the preparation. So it turns out, according to the BBC, there's diamond rain on Jupiter and Saturn. And it's because there are hailstones that are from soot like carbon and it hardens into graphite and then diamond as it falls. Very cool. Hey, folks, this is Alex after the taping because, boy, oh, boy, what an exciting thing

Sorin found. I want to do more research on it so I could talk about it, you know, intelligibly and then come back to tell you about it. Because it turns out Saturn, as Sorin said, has diamond rain. And that's also a thing on Jupiter and then slightly differently a thing on Uranus and on Neptune. The gas giants of the solar system out there further than Mars and everything else. They are raining diamonds as like a kind of precipitation. Also, from what I read,

it seems like that's a fair name for it. Diamond rain. This is not like a headline eyes diversion of science that you get sometimes. Main source I'm going to link is a BBC News article from 2013. That's by reporter James Morgan. Also going to link space a BBC News article from 2013 that's by reporter James Morgan. Also going to link Space.com talking mainly about Uranus and Neptune doing this, but that's a piece by Paul Sutter published in January of 2022. So recently, too, people are saying these four gas giants in the solar system all have diamond rain. Of course, this is a Saturn show. How does it work on Saturn? The BBC says lightning storms turn methane into so course, this is a Saturn show. How does it work on Saturn? The BBC says

lightning storms turn methane into soot, which is carbon. And as you may know, a diamond is very, very hardened carbon. And so what happens is the lightning storm turns the methane into carbon that falls toward the center of Saturn. As it falls, it gets harder and harder. It goes from carbon to graphite, if you know like pencil material. Also check out the number two pencils episode if you want to get way into that. But the carbon turns into graphite and then that turns into diamonds. Main expert the BBC is talking to is Kevin Baines. Kevin Baines is at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He's also at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He says the biggest diamonds on Saturn would likely be about a centimeter in diameter.

So that's very large. That's larger than a diamond in, say, an engagement ring. He also says that 1,000 tons of diamonds are being created on Saturn each year. Also, this phenomenon has not been directly observed. This is something that scientists are deducing based on the chemistry of the planet and the weather on the planet. Upshot of all this is the BBC says diamond rain could be, quote, the most common precipitation in the solar system. End quote. Right? Earth rain, kind of an outlier, kind of rare across all these planets. Pretty fun. Anyway, as I say in the conversation too, really grateful to Sorin. He brings so much joy and excitement about these planets into these episodes.

And let's get back to the conversation. Dan? Maybe next time. Well, if we let Cassini probe come home where it was supposed to be, it could have collected some of those diamonds, come back, and then we flip those diamonds and make a profit. Right. Make some of this money work for us. Yeah yeah like if it has a big scoop on it yeah conflict-free diamonds i mean it might i'm saying it's conflict-free because i don't know i don't know if you're allowed to handle might get mad handle diamonds with a scoop i think you may need like a like a velvet pouch on it

isn't that how diamonds are carried? You have to scoop it up. It has to be a soft little bag. Yeah, sure. Did you ever answer Dan's question about what the rings are made out of? Like what they look like up close? Oh, like, like the material of it? Yeah. He wants to know if he can cut himself on them because they look so sharp.

Yeah. That's, oh yeah, I skipped it. So Saturn's rings are incredibly thin they're a little more than one kilometer thick which is 0.66 miles thick but they're about four or five planet earths wide and i mean just if you like measure one section not all the way across the whole planet so they're incredibly wide incredibly thin national geographic also says they're in seven different groups of rings that astronomers letter a through g but they're yeah they're made of

mostly dust particles is most of what they're made of i can't stand on it walk around on it dance no i don't think so right through yeah i don't know they're like big clone i assumed it was you know in cartoons and stuff it's always when they get close it's big it's like volleyball size rocks and is that just too big am i imagining that too large is it actually even smaller than that just little granulars yeah there's ice and rock there too it's like ice rock and dust all put together and it's it seems to be what's left probably what's left over from a moon or comet being destroyed and how come there's gaps like there's clean gaps in between. There are rings as opposed to just one big ring.

Yeah, it's in different sections with gaps. Yeah, it looks like one big ring in cartoons and stuff, but they are in separate ones. And even as late as the 70s, 80s, we're discovering new sets. There's one other ring thing here, which is that there might be a next set of rings in a nearer part of the solar system soon. Soon in astronomy time again. Scientists think that in the next 20 to 80 million years, one of the two moons of Mars will break apart.

Specifically the moon Phobos that goes around Mars. And so that debris will probably stay in Martian orbit and then maybe Mars would have rings. Here's what I hate about these gutless cuck NASA scientists. They got no skin in the game because they make these predictions for well after they're dead. First of all, it's like a flimsy prediction. It's like we think this might happen maybe somewhere 100 million years from now. Easiest, cushiest gig in the world. A NASA

scientist making predictions that they never have to back up or see bear fruit. You think that they're getting paid per prediction? They make the prediction and they're like, alright, that's a pretty good one. That's worth 100 million dollars. That's how they get their funding.

It is the opposite of sports predictions, where a pundit just makes a prediction about that day's game and is wrong half the time, and it's fine. Weathermen, if they get the weather wrong, we're allowed to kill them, and we do. But NASA scientists never have to suffer that kind of pain. No one's checking anything. But NASA scientists never have to suffer that kind of pain. No one's checking anything. Only checks, ones that go into NASA's pocket from my billfold or whatever. Billfold.

You've got checks in your billfold. Just written out to NASA. Yeah. Here are some things because I don't want to be self-parody. I mean, space is stupid, and I'm right about everything I've said so far. Things that I think are interesting. Saturn is so big, but it's not very heavy. That's cool.

That's the kind of fact that gets my... Gets the blood pumping. My dick up. The other thing, I do think it's funny and interesting and creative that crashing a probe into something is how we learn stuff. I don't know what it is about the probe that like where it's got like feelers on the outside that once they come into contact with something that transmits information back to us. I don't understand how the process works, but I think it's cool. I think it's a smart move on NASA to think like everything that crashes also teaches us something. That's cool. Good job, NASA.

Yeah. And good job, Italy, NASA. I agree. It's so neat that this mission ended with a sort of a high point as far as information goes. And then we're just still breaking down information from it. Like one of these studies was published in 2021 and there's they're still picking apart this data that they all got okay that information i don't care for i don't think we should still be looking into space i feel like we know enough now we know all the hit stuff right so get out of here they

did stop they did they called the crash that nasa called it like the grand finale that was the We know all the hit stuff. Right. So get out of here. They did. Stop it. They did. They called the crash that NASA called it like the grand finale. That was the branding for it. Maybe it really should have been a finale, huh? Just wrap it up. Just, you know, pack it up, go home. Read the room. Am I remembering this correctly? I thought I saw a headline a couple weeks ago that we were done with some kind of satellite of ours and we were going to just let it crash into the ocean here on Earth.

Again, I feel like we're missing an opportunity to just push those things further out into space. I mean, don't bring your trash home. Just like get it out of orbit the other direction. See where it goes. Yeah. Yeah. See what you get. Right. home just like get it out of orbit the other direction see where it goes yeah yeah see what you get right because god forbid we introduce some earth life into one of saturn's precious moons god forbid we do that but meanwhile we're gonna let our trash sink into the ocean harming

our beautiful intelligent octopuses i'm angry again i forgot if i forgot that i was wrapping this up and being happy and i'm angry again it is really nice I was wrapping this up and being happy, and I'm angry again. It is really nice that you, like, it's clear that you do care enough about, like, the natural world that you even knew that the plural of octopus was octopuses and not octopi. You were like, you care that much. Yeah. Loves the sea. Way into it. I think that transitions well into the bonus about moons of Saturn, where one of them is an ocean.

Pretty cool. Goodbye, main show. Play the music. That did it. That's how news anchors should sign off. Goodbye, main show. Credits now. that's a news anchor should sign off credits now i'm imagining the bonus show for the local news that's just really fun to me take their time this next thing's not really news i just thought it was kind of interesting it's a lot of banter just between the two anchors.

Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to Soren Bui and Daniel O'Brien for covering both sides of the Saturn issue. What a fun way to do it. I love it. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly, incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on patrion.com patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating

story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is two of the most amazing moons in the whole solar system, the Saturnian moons of Enceladus and Titan. Going to two moons, Enceladus and Titan. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than seven dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring Saturn with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, almost everything we know about Saturn is new information from Cassini-Huygens. Takeaway number two, on an astronomical scale, we're lucky to be around while Saturn has rings. And then tons more info about Saturn's size, scale, floatiness, and so much more in the Stats and Numbers.

Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. in the stats and numbers. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. Soren Bui writes for American Dad, which is on TBS in the United States. A lot of it is on Hulu as well. Daniel O'Brien writes for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

That airs most Sundays on HBO and is, of course, on HBO Max. And I'm saying the United States channels and dates, you can find your local listings elsewhere. Also, please, anywhere in the world, find their podcast, Quick Question with Sorin and Daniel. You can search that podcast name in your podcast app, Quick Question with Sorin and Daniel, or you can follow the links for this podcast episode at sifpod.fun. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. An amazing piece for The Atlantic by Marina Koren. It was published March of 2022.

It's called The Long Goodbye to Saturn's Rings. All of Marina Koren's work over at The Atlantic. It's just incredible for all space stuff. Also leaned on writing from Space.com by Megan Bartels, from Smithsonian Magazine by David Kindy. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode.

Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show about Enceladus and about Titan. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.