Short Wave - Solve A Moon Mystery! With Radiolab

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

All summer long, we've been on a 10-episode odyssey through the changing universe (check out the series). But there was one big set of objects that we skipped over: moons. So now we're back, with special guest, Radiolab's Latif Nasser, to talk about yes, our moon — and the many moons and quasi-moons beyond it. Where did our Moon come from? How many moons are out there? What's this "quasi-moon" of which we speak and why is it "dancing" around space? Also, Latif tells us about Radiolab's contest to name a quasi-moon. Read all the details and submit a name here!Lunar questions or otherwise celestial musings you think we should cover? We'd love to hear about it! You can reach us by emailing [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwaveers, Emily Kwong here. And me, Regina Barber, and M all summer long, we've been on this like 10 episode Odyssey through our changing universe. We've covered planets, stars, living in space, and even like how it's all going to end. But there's one big set of objects in space that we've totally skipped over. We're going to take care of that in this episode where we bring our space camp series back to our solar system.

With a very special guest, a maister of mayhem just like us, Latif Nasser, co-host of the Radio Lab podcast from WNYC. Hey. Thank you for having me. I feel so honored to be a space camp. This is the space camp I never got to go to. Yeah, us either. You are welcome, Lutte. Okay.

So about a year and a half ago, Lutth, you were solving a space mystery. It all started with this one poster. What happened? Yeah, I was putting my kid to bed. We had a solar system poster. We bought from the internet on his wall. At a corner of my eye, I saw that Venus had a moon, which was so weird. I was like, I don't remember learning that in school that Venus had a moon.

Not only that, though, the Venus moon on this poster, it had a name, and the name was Z-O-O-Z-V-E. How do you say that? Zuzve? I don't know. I know as well as you do. So, first of all, I Googled, does Venus have a moon? First result is from NASA. saying Venus does not have a moon.

And the second thing I did is Google, this word, Zuzvei, no English results. Like, how often does that happen on Google? Never. Never, right? Right. So I was like, what is happening? I called a friend of mine, her name's Liz Landau. She works at NASA.

And she fields questions from reporters about space. I was like, she must have heard of this before. I'm like, okay, so what's Zuzvay? And she's like, I have no idea. I've never heard that. Venus definitely doesn't have a minute. I have no idea what you're talking about. Weird.

So what happened then? She texted me after we talked, and she was like, I cracked it. It's not Zeus-Ve. It's 2002-V-E. The Zeds were actually twos. The Zs were actually zeros. The O's were actually zeros. It's Tuesdays-Ve.

It actually is a thing. And it is a thing near Venus that's up there. But then the question became, okay, so wait, What is this thing? And is it a moon of Venus or is it not a moon of Venus? And the answer is that it's kind of both. Turns out it's called a quasi-satellite or a quasi-moon. quasi-satellite, quasi-moon.

Gina, have you heard of these things before? Yeah, so they go by multiple names. One of my planetary scientist friends calls these things near-earth asteroids. And it's interesting to think about how these are not making the moon cut because what scientists do call moons already spans like a very wonderful. spectrum. You've got like our moon, which actually was made in this like spectacular way. And it's unlike moons around other planets in our solar system. Our moon is also like nothing like the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, these gas giants, because their moons are more like Earth. It's like

moon diversity. I love it. Yeah. You know, why we want to bring you on, Latif is because you determine basically that Venus does have a quasi-moon. And you went through a formal process with the International Astronomical Union to officially rename 2002 VE. It's officially Zosve. You did it. And now Radio Lab has launched a contest to invite anyone to name a different quasi-moon closer to Earth, right? Yeah, it was so much fun.

I want everyone to have the fun. So we partnered, Radio Lab partnered with the IAU to launch a month-long global naming contest for one of Earth's quasim moons, which means if you are listening to this podcast right now, you could be. the next person to name one. So today on the show, a moon tour with Regina and Lutif, starting with the surprising history of our very own moon. You are listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

All right, so before we get into the contest and quasi-moons, let's start with some moon fundamentals. Okay. Like our moon, the royal moon. Gina, tell me about the moon near Earth. Does it have a special name? No. It's called the mood. It's like we got the generic brand moon.

I mean, but we got it because we named it before we found all the other ones, right? So like it was the OG, right? And it's the brightest thing in the sky. And it's a natural satellite, satellite being something that orbits, you know, a larger body in space. Okay. But for a long time, did scientists even know how ours got there? Yeah, so scientists really had these theories about how we got a lot of. our own moon. And one of them is like that the moon was captured. Was it this like floating this

asteroid or something and we just like grabbed it. The other one was like it formed with the same stuff within this planetary disc as Earth. The other hypothesis was maybe Earth was spinning so fast when it was being created to kind of like pooped it out. Like a planet turn. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. And the last one is that there was this giant collision with some other object and it broke pieces off of Earth and created the moon. Wow, that's kind of the most dramatic one. Well, which one's right? Yeah, so the leading theory now is that giant collision that our moon used to be part of Earth. And scientists think that when the early solar system was forming, something the size of like Mars collided with this proto-Earth probably like 4.5 billion years ago. Here's Jorge Nunez. He's a

planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins that I talked to. And so as a result of this sort of combined collision of, you know, cataclysmic proportions. The Earth came to beam, but that remand material that got kicked out, coalesced, and started orbiting around the Earth. And what formed became the moon. So the moon could be the debris of this cataclysmic collision that is now, like, held in place by Earth's gravity? Yeah, it's not even could at this point.

The debate was pretty much settled when scientists were able to study. lunar samples brought back by NASA's Apollo missions. This was like 1969, early 70s. They were able to compare sort of the elements and the isotopes, and they were able to determine that, oh, hey, the isotopes and minerals on the moon are very similar, almost exactly the same as the Earths. And these rock samples also showed that the moon had been like molten when it formed and was covered with an ocean of magma,

which only could have been possible after this, like, giant impact. Wow. Wow. It's fun when like history turns out to be the most dramatic version of itself. Yes. We've discovered other moons in our solar system. Like how many are we talking? Like hundreds. So according to NASA's solar system dynamics team, the total number of moons orbiting planets in our solar system is like 293. You know, Earth's got R1, Mars has two, Saturn has like 146 moons. Wow.

But then there are these moons that are orbiting other moons. which Lettif a while ago you told me are called... Moon moons. Yeah, moon moons. Scientists have documented over 470 of those. And like NASA is continually finding just moons upon moons. So you got all of these orbital bodies up there kicking around. There's moons.

There's also moon moons, apparently. Some of these moons, though, are so interesting to us that there are sites of active scientific inquiry. Regina, tell us about the moon that NASA is. planning on visiting soon. Yeah, so this is actually Jorge's like area of expertise, like Titan. It's Saturn's largest moon. And its surface is like obscured

because it has this like really dense atmosphere. It's one of the only objects in our solar system that actually has a thick atmosphere. And Titan's thick atmosphere is mostly made of nitrogen like Earth. And that's in part why Titanist looks so hazy is because basically it has smog. So if you think back of like the 1980s, right, L.A., 1980s or early 90s, that it's very smoggy.

You barely see the mountains from the city. That's kind of imagine how it sort of tightening looks like. So cool. Okay, so you got like this smoggy L.A. in the 90s-era atmosphere. What else is going on on Titan? Liquid. Oh. Like this place has lakes and rivers and oceans.

Wow. They're not made of water. They're made of liquid hydrocarbons like methane and ethane. And they're hundreds of feet deep, hundreds of miles wide. And they're really, really, really cold because, you know, Saturn is so far away from the sun. So because it's cold, there's this, like, layer of frozen water. And underneath that frozen water is actually liquid water and ammonia. And maybe there, there could be some sort of life.

Gina, everything you're describing, I mean, it's so sci-fi. It's so cool. It sounds completely non-safe for humans. So how is NASA planning to like study Titan? So there's this mission called Dragonfly, and it's scheduled for 2028. And it's basically going to be like this craft that's going to fly around Titan. And it's going to examine these like various locations on that movie. And so Titan is kind of this laboratory of sort of what happens when you have all these sort of ingredients that are important for life, right?

like methane, liquid water, organic materials. And you have a laboratory that's running experiments for billions of years. Wow. Okay. And that's, this is all just literally all of everything we've been talking about is on one moon. And there's just, there's so many moons out there. Yeah. So I actually looked this up.

And the International Astronomical Union says that there's so many moons. They no longer like name the smallest moon unless there's like significant scientific interest. So there's like probably thousands out there. When I was talking to the guy who discovered Zuzwe, Brian Skiff, he told me that a lot of scientists, they have naming fatigue because they name so many, they've discovered so many things and they just, like, have run out of names for them, basically. Wow. Let's have you been focusing on, like, quasi-moons as a legitimate moon that we should be naming in light

of this fatigue? I mean, Zuzwe could have easily just fallen by the wayside. But not for you, like not for a radio lab, which is super cool. Making a difference. There we go. How is a quasi-moon, though, different from a regular moon? So, Emily and Gina, okay, so everything you just heard about moons, just throw that out the window because none of that applies to quasi-moons. Okay.

Okay, so think about it this way. So, okay, so a moon orbits, you know, a planet or another large object, right? A quasi-moon, it actually orbits the star. It orbits the sun. And sort of while it's orbiting the sun, it does so so close and at the same rate as a planet that it's sort of gravitationally influenced by that planet. So it's almost like Zuzwe is orbiting the sun. 99% of its sort of where it's going is influenced by the pull of the sun, the sun, you know, within it around. But 1% is influenced by Venus.

Because it's sort of close enough to Venus that Venus has this little toehold on it. Yeah, so basically Zuzvay isn't like gravitationally bound to Venus. It's mostly kind of bound within our solar system like the planets are around the sun. So this is totally different from the Earth, right? Like Earth and the Moon. They are totally gravitationally bound. Like that's why we have ties. But Zuzwe is far more free form.

Is what you're saying? Yeah, it's loosey-goosey. Yeah, it's actually, it's so complicated, and that's one of the reasons why I really dig it. Because you just, I feel like we all grew up looking at that solar system poster, and you just imagine everything going in those ovals, right, on those tracks. But Zuzwe is kind of different because it's doing this kind of three-way dance with the sun and with Venus.

And in a few hundred years from now, it's not going to be with Venus anymore. This Finnish scientist I talked to. In Finland, my name is pronounced. Seppo. Mikola. He told me that it's so complicated, you just cannot calculate where it's going to go after that.

Mathematically, it's impossible to follow it. Exactly. There are no equations telling how the bodies will move. So, Leptif, you and your colleagues, I mean, you had so much fun learning about Zuzwe and naming Zuzvay that you wanted to give the general public a chance to name a different quasi-moon. Now, this quasi-moon is near Earth, like our Earth. What is it called and what are

the rules for renaming it? It has the very sexy name of 164-207 right now. Oh, gotchy. Yeah, right? So it doesn't really have a name. That's why we want to name it. And the other kind of key rule is that it has to be a mythological inspired name. Well, the polls are open, folks. You can make celestial history. If you've ever wanted to name an orbital body now is like truly your chance. Go to radio lab.org slash moon. We have the link in our episode notes as well as the Zuzwe episodes.

You can hear the long and winding journey to how Lutiv got to this place, as well as more reporting from our space camp series. Lutv and Gina, thanks so much for hanging out with me. Oh, man. What a pleasure. Love talking about moods. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin, and it was edited by Rebecca Ramirez.

It was fact-checked by Regina, Hannah, and May. Maggie Luthor was the audio engineer. Julia Carney is our space camp project manager. Ben Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. Special thanks to our friends at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, home of space camp. I'm Emily Kwong, and I'm Regina Barber.

Thank you for listening to Shorewave from NPR. Thank you.