StarTalk Radio - Cosmic Queries – Planet 9

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

Could there be a hidden planet lurking beyond Pluto and Neptune? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice tackle a wide-ranging grab bag of fan questions covering Planet 9, galaxy shapes, dark matter, the odds of getting hit by a meteorite, and more! NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Thanks to our Patrons Glenn Fiskin, A. Certain Woman, Jeffrey Schwartz, Adam Watson, Micheal Lawson, Aaron Hardy, Terje Berg, Peter Wells, Tyler, Brody Johnson, Ali, NanZan, SAMuri, Marian Bieniek, Jeff Whitney, Richard Ruffner, Adrian J Batson, Holly Grant, Amy Braden, Andrew Puente, Srihari Ravi, Eliezar Vega, Southern Tauren, Adam Tate, John Johnson, Achim Ferrandina, Rebecca Crowe, Cody May, Gary, William Green, Max_Palmer09, Dylan, Jonas and Aisté, Frank Pucino, Isaac Kinsey, Sean Whitehall, Anthony Prisco, Nathan Thornton, Alex Grzesiak, Lora Vatalaro, Manny Neto, Eric M, Robert Davies, Billy Metcalfe, Gabriel Gish, Sherry Lee Rachar, Alexander Nemeth, Ra.Spec, and Atticus Thompson for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early.Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Chuck, another query's grab bag. Yes. My favorite one is the person wants to know what the chance of getting hit by a meteor. Yes, and you were actually taken out by a meteor. Almost. Oh, okay. Film at 11 on StarTalk.

Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is... StarTalk Cosmic Queries. And as always, it's a grab bag edition. And I got Chuck Nice with me. How are you doing, Chuck?

Hey, Neil. Doing well, man. Thanks for asking. There's no shortage of people's question. Yes, people really inquiring minds want to know. So bring it on. Let's jump right into it. Andy L says,

hello, stellar intellects and also co-host of the week. My name is, he is, he is, assumed that the co-host is clearly not of a stellar intellect. So this is. But he's allowing it to have been other co-hosts because we have other co-hosts to come in. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. That's why I'm not taking it personally. He says, hey, my name is pronounced and D. See, now that lets me know that he thinks it's me. See, now you're full of it. And D. and I know what the D stands for too. Anyway.

By the way, that's another name. It's a nickname for Richard. Thank you. It's also a nickname for Private Detective. That's correct. Private Dick. That's right. Yes. And that's why in the opening song to the movie Shaft, Isaac Hayes sings,

who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks? Yeah, I don't think he was talking about investigations. That was a line I had to like listen to a few times and then I had to look up the definition and one of the definitions of Dick was private detective. So that was a weird, that's right.

Go to scripting there. Okay, go ahead. Go ahead. Way to go. Isaac Hayes. He said, I've heard there may be a large planet or dwarf planet orbiting beyond Pluto. Planet 9. The so-called Planet X.

What exactly are the scientific observations causing this suspicion? Could the new Rubin Telescope find such an object? Thank you, Andy, from Thousand Oaks, California. I do not know the targeted zones of the Ruben telescope. Generally, if you're going to find a planet and you don't know that it's a planet, you need several observations because otherwise the stars, though, move to orbit the galaxy are so far away from night to night, they basically keep the same position. But something orbiting the sun would not from night to night, week to week, month

to month. So I think in principle, the Ruben telescope would be able to detect such a thing, but it would have to be directed to a region of space where we think it is and then hang out there just for that purpose. But that's not what the telescope was designed for. It was designed as a survey telescope of the entire sky looking for whatever moves in the survey zone. So that's my first point. Second, the way we have colleagues who think about this and do these experiments, there are these, Pluto, we discovered in the last 20 years, 25 years, is just the most prominent member of a new swath of real estate discovered in our solar system. called the Kuiper Belt, named after a Dutch, I think Dutch American astronomer, J.R.

Kuiper by mid-century, he hypothesized the existence of a repository of comets that didn't participate in the formation of the rest of the solar system. In fact, he made the inverse prediction. He would say, he said, there's a region out there where there would be comets if they didn't participate. Okay. It was one of those. kind of backhanded predictions. Turns out there are thousands of dirty ice balls orbiting well beyond Neptune, including Pluto. Okay. So, and the Kuiper belt is huge. So observations of Kuiper belt objects tell us that maybe they are responding to another source of gravity in the outer solar system and not just in their orbit around the sun. There's

There's movements that can't otherwise be explained if they're simply orbiting the sun. So that allows you to say maybe there's another source of gravity out there that's mysteriously tugging on these objects we do see. Now, if it's a planet, it's going to be much bigger than just a Kiperbelll object. But if you can't see it, it must be much farther away. So they're placing it at a distance below their detection limits because they're saying otherwise we would seen it. And when you do this, this thing is really far away. So there's still a lot of speculation. There's been some skepticism of the observations and the interpretation. But that's what it is. And that's how we infer that there might be a planet nine or a new planet X. Because we all

know Pluto got done demoted. Right. Yes. So they have an and crawled through a mile of Anyway. Okay. This is Eric Leroy who says, greetings Neil and Chuck Eric Leroy here, exercise physiologists and spaceflight physiology researcher from NYC. And my question is, what are the requirements established by the IAU that led to the demotion of Pluto

as one of the major planets of our solar system? In my opinion, not specific enough and should include granular measurements in addition to the phrase clearing its neighborhood. I believe if Pluto was given its title as the ninth planet back, there would be a surge in scientific and astronomical interest around the world of all ages. Thank you for all that you do in the name of science. So he's saying, let's create a controversy that will spur. interest in astrology once again

astronomy once again I said astrology just oh Jesus astronomy once again by giving Pluto planetary status back the rules weren't diabolically conceived just to get rid of Pluto it's not how that worked okay so here's what happened

let me remind people as our telescopes got better, as the Keck telescope started looking in the outer solar system, in the region of space where Pluto orbits, we started finding other objects. And there was an object whose size rivaled that of Pluto. And no one was prepared to call that a planet. So that forced a whole fresh look at what Pluto is, where it is, how it's orbiting, and why. On doing so, we found not only is Pluto more than half ice by volume, like comets are, Pluto is orbiting a region of the solar system that we would discover has countless thousands of other icy bodies in the outer solar system.

These, we would more commonly call comets. Pluto was the first discovered because it was the biggest and the brightest. You would expect the biggest and the brightest to be discovered first. Then we have better telescopes. And now they're popping up. We've lost count of the number of Kuiper Belt objects that are out there. So this is not different from the year 1801 where a new planet was discovered orbiting between Mars and Jupiter.

That was a big gap anyway between Mars and Jupiter on a planetary scale. We said something has to be there. Let's keep looking. We found a planet. We called it series. named in the tradition of a Roman god, as were all the other planets. Then we found another one. And then another.

And then another. Series, Palace, P-A-L-L-A-S, Vesta and Juno. Wow. And it says, wow, the planet count just to be a big leap. And then we said, well, wait a minute, how come when I look at them through a telescope, you don't see a disc the way you see a disc, like you see Jupiter, you see weather bands on it, Saturn, you see rings. You know, that's Pluto calling you right now.

When you look at the other planets, you see the physical, spherical object that is the planet. When you look at these planets, they're just dots of light. They're really tiny. And we know they're orbiting the sun and they're reflecting sunlight. because we can follow the orbit. But when you look at stars, they're just dots of light. But we know these are not stars. They're just star-like.

Wait a minute. What's a word for star-like? I'm going to say asteroid. Asteroid. Once we started discovering dozens of these things, we said we can't call these things planets. What instead has happened is that we have discovered a brand- new swath of real estate in the solar system that we didn't previously know was there.

Another belt. A belt. And generally, it's a belt if it's flat but goes around the circle, like it rims the sun, the asteroid belt. So overnight, those four new planets were, quote, demoted to asteroid status. And now there's countless hundreds of thousands, likely millions of asteroids discovered and catalog orbiting in that zone. Okay.

Having discovered Pluto first and thinking it's a planet and then discovering another object and another and we kind of been down that road before. We have countless Kiper Belt objects all in an orbit that is spread around the sun enclosing the trajectory of Pluto. That's the first strike against it. It's not isolated in its orbit. orbital zone. It is one among many whose size rivals it. Wow. Okay. Two. Yeah, it's small, but that alone doesn't indict you. It's big enough to be a sphere. If you're small,

if it's got enough mass to be a sphere, if you have much less mass than that, then the gravity doesn't overcome the structural integrity of the rocks and the rocks went out. So most asteroids look like Idaho potatoes. Okay, there's whatever the rock is. That's its shape. But when you get bigger, gravity pulls the high places into the low, fills them in, and you become a sphere eventually. Interesting fact about gravitational physics.

All right. So Pluto did not clear its orbit. Pluto, because it's in a swath of real estate completely filled with other objects that rival it in size. What else? Do you have to be to be a planet? You have to be big enough to be round. Pluto is big enough to be round. It is. But it needs more than one criterion to be satisfied for planet status. Having failed one of those two, it got, quote, demoted to dwarf planet status. However, you know, series, the first asteroid discovered, that's the only asteroid that's round.

Of course, it was big enough for gravity to make it round. And of course, that's going to be the first asteroid you discover. Series has more mass than all the other asteroids combined. So Sirius got a promotion. At the same time Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet, asteroid series was elevated to dwarf planet. And so Pluto has company. There are many dwarf planets.

in the solar system to join it. And like I said, it's half ice by volume. If you brought it to where Earth is right now, heat from the sun would evaporate the ice and it would grow a tail. And the third criterion I left out, sorry,

you can't cross the orbit of other planets. Oh. That's a no way. Pluto spends 20 years out of the 48-year life closer to the sun, than planet Neptune. It crosses Neptune. It goes to the outside to the inside.

For the inside. And by the way, that's what comments do that routinely. They cross all the planet orbits as they plunge in towards the sun. Right. So out of three criteria, Pluto failed two of them. It's a fraud, Pluto. You are fraud. However, however, while it had planetary status, we discovered a new element,

it basically invented a new element in the laboratory that we named after Pluto. And so Pluto now has an element on the periodic table from false pretenses. Just thought I put it out there. And in sequence, there's element 92, which is uranium, named after which planet? Take a guess. I'm going to say Mars. No, of course, Uranus. Uranus. And then there's Neptuneium. That's element number 93, named after Neptune, and element 94, plutonium, named after Pluto.

Pluto was discovered in 1930. Plutonium was isolated in 1940. It was weaponized, turned into a bomb, and used in warfare five years later. Damn. Damn. That's right. Wow. look at that Pluto the most destructive non-planet ever wow that was the first time I've seen you give that exhaustive

list of Pluto's failure to be a planet I well listen Eric I hope that did it for you man because you get over it otherwise Yes, yes, yeah. Get over it.

That's terrible. But really, get over it. All right. Hello, I'm Thinking Broke Allen, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Nailed Grass Tyson. Let's go to Narav Shah, who says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice. I am from India, now living in Arizona. I have listened to you, Dr. Tyson, for years and appreciate your storytelling such that

it helps me recall things and I share it with my fellows. Could you please share the connection between theory of relativity, quantum physics, and semiconductor physics, how the former eventually allowed the latter to develop. Thank you for everything that you guys at StarTalk do. There's no direct connection that I know of between relativity and what happens in a circuit board. But relativity is what we call modern physics, which was discovered in the 20th century, just as quantum physics was. So often, if you take a college class in modern physics,

you learn both relativity and quantum physics together in a first introduction to, in your first step beyond classical physics. All right. So quantum physics, quantum, people say you took a quantum leap. A quantum is a very small unit, discovered originally as a single. small unit of energy that cannot be continuously varied, a quanta of energy. You can't have one and a half quanta. You can have one, you can have two, you can have three, you can't have fractional quanta. That's the whole construct of that understanding. So in circuits,

you're moving electrons around. To understand electrons and what they do and who they behave even why, you need quantum physics. You need quantum physics to understand anything that's going on inside of molecules and atoms and nuclei. So you don't have to single out the semiconductor and its importance to civilization being fed by innovations in quantum physics because it's all quantum physics. So I don't know how to reply, other than to say just a couple of things about semiconductors, a semiconductor typically uses a wafer of silicon with, which is an insulator, mixed with some other material that's a conductor of electricity. Insulator does not transmit it.

Conductor does. Semiconductor is configured so that you can control the passage of electricity at will and on command. depending on the needs of the circuit. And so semiconductors became highly useful, especially in computing. And the race was how to make the tiniest semiconductor that had the most number of circuits in it. So you can, when I grew up, computers were the size of whole rooms. That's how old I am. Those were four function calculators.

Wow. Walk into the room and it was hot because it had vacuum tubes that were. that radiated heat, quantum physics enables the IT revolution entirely. And so I don't know what more to say about that. Other than that, we're in the centennial decade of quantum physics. And let's celebrate that fact, because civilization, as we know it, would not exist without it. Well, thank you, quantum. Yeah.

There you go. All right, let's move on to Derek Evans. Hi, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice. Derek here from South Windsor, Connecticut. My question is about the shape of galaxies. As we know, they take many forms outside the stereotypical spiral shape. But what ultimately dictates a galaxy's shape? Do they all rotate?

And if so, does shape indicate age or developmental stage? That sounds very psychotherapy. What is your development on stage? Are you lagging behind? I'm a little stunted. You know what I mean? All the other galaxies seem to have it together, man. You know, I'm just really confused all the time.

And I'm so angry all the time, too. I don't know if it's because I'm a spiral galaxy or a sombrero galaxy. I honestly don't know what my identity is. There is a galaxy named the sombrero galaxy. It's not a kind of galaxy. It's the name of a galaxy. Oh, is that the name? Yeah, it looks like a sombrero.

Yeah, yeah. And it looks well, okay. There you go. Okay, so if you start out with a gas cloud, right, huge gas cloud, if it's, depending on how fast it's rotating, if it's hardly rotating at all and it collapses, it doesn't flatten.

It stays kind of three dimensions. dimensionally. Globular. We call them elliptical galaxies. Oh, really? There's spherical elliptical shapes. Okay. And they rotate very slowly.

Okay. All right. If you have more rotation than that, you will flatten as you collapse. And you become very flat, flatter than a flapjack. You become as flat as a crape, almost as flat as a tortilla.

And so our galaxy, the Milky Way when seen edge on would almost disappear from your sight line for that reason. And what happens is a galaxy gets stars from its gas clouds. And in this elliptical galaxies, for reasons not fully understood or were not fully understood the last I looked at this problem, that's the more the safe way to say that. Elliptical galaxies were very efficient making stars. So they made all, they used up all their gas and made all the stars and there's no gas left. So when you don't have gas, you're not doing what?

I'm going to say ruining the dinner because you're rude at the table. Gas. These are different gases, Chuck. Not hydrogen sulfide. So, yeah, so elliptical galaxies are mostly gas-free. They made all their stars early on and the stars are just, aging right now. Whereas spiral galaxies, they retained 10%, 20%, sometimes 30% of their mass in gas. Wow. So there's still stars being formed. So when you see those beautiful photos from JWST and Hubble

of these gas clouds and stuff, we have probed those gas clouds, it's where stars are born. Stellar nurseries? Yes, stellar nurseries. So these are the differences among the galaxies, Viral galaxies are inefficient, converting their gas into stars. Elliptical galaxies are very efficient. And so there you have it. Now there are galaxies that are very disturbed looking. Those are the galaxies that are like,

you come near me, I'll kill you. You think you're going to collide with me? I will kill you. Try to collide with me and see what happens. Those are the belligerent category of galaxies. It's reminded because it reminds me just bullies. You don't even know the bully. You step on their toe.

You do that again. I'll kill you. Exactly. It's like, bro, get in therapy. What is your problem? Galactic therapy. So in my lifetime, there was a catalog of galaxies that was published by a Caltech astrophysicist named Halton Ark, nicknamed Shepardial.

Chip, Chip, Chip Arp. And it was called the ARP Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. He went around all the sky, the night sky. He cataloged galaxies that were just weird looking, disturbed looking, distorted looking. And we didn't have the answer to the question, did galaxies become this? Or were they born this way? the way, what's your name was, Lady Gaga. That's the Gaga Galaxy. Were they born this way or did something happen to them? It was not until we were able to bring computing power to this problem in the late 60s, but mostly in the 1970s, where we can say, what happens to two grand design spiral galaxies if they collide?

Oh my gosh. It's a train wreck. Stars don't actually collide with each other, but they feel each other's gravity. And the gravity cast stars hither and yon. And it looks like a train wreck. So if you stop action, the footage of galaxies colliding, here they are coming near each other. Here they are partly overlapping.

Here they are deeply overlapping. And you do this. Then you have a template handed to you by your computer of, colliding galaxies in all stages that they could collide. Now you hold that to Chip Arp's catalog, and you can explain 90% of those galaxies. I had a mentor once who said a crashed Lexus is not a different kind of Lexus. It's still a Lexus.

Why he chose Lexus? I don't know. But that was his car brand that he used. And there are also galaxies that are just irregular in shape for no good reason. You know what we call those? I'm going to go with irregular galaxy. Chuck, you're such a fast study here. So we have spiral galaxies, elliptical galaxies, irregular galaxies. They look kind of like puppy vomit, you know, on the ground.

You know, it's just any, it just, they tend to be very. Gash, tend to be gaseous, which means they can make stars. And then there are galaxies that are just generally small, a catch basin of galaxies. And we call them dwarf galaxies. Oh, course. Irregular galaxies are dwarf galaxies. You can also have small elliptical galaxies. We call those dwarf galaxies as well.

You can see them going off to work singing, hi-ho, hi-ho. Hi-ho. I wrote an essay, one of my early writing forays, where I was paid. I think I got paid $300 for this essay for a newsletter. And it's called The Galaxy and the Seven Dwarfs. That's what it was called. And because we have, our galaxy has, at the time, seven known dwarf galaxies that orbit us. Typically a dwarf galaxy is a member of some other association of galaxies.

So there you have it. That's more galaxy evolution than maybe you bargain for. But that's the, that's how it goes. And Chuck, those are the basic categories of galaxies, but there are also galaxies that just do weird things that might be hybrids of these others that I just listed for you. There are quasars and blazers and lenticular galaxies and radio galaxies that give mostly radio waves. So there are variants on this, but what I described to you are 95% of all the galaxies in the universe. Okay. Well, very cool. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Narav. Let's move on to Melinda Washington. She says, hello from North Carolina. As a new autodidact, I'm excited to explore astrophysics in a focus and structured way instead of jumping between topics. How would you recommend breaking the subject into manageable pieces? What materials would you suggest? And in what order should I approach them to build a strong? Foundation. Thank you both for always sparking my curiosity and inspiring me to keep learning.

Always looking up, Melinda Washington. Oh, love it. Love it. So at the risk of sounding self-serving, I co-authored a textbook with two colleagues at Princeton University when we co-taught a class. One of us taught stars and planets, the others taught galaxies and the third taught cosmology. And we, the class started out with 30 people. And over the years it had like hundreds and hundreds. This was at Princeton University. And so we said, why don't we turn this into a textbook?

And we did. And the textbook is highly readable. It's not like learn this for the problem set and the syllabus. And so the book is called, Welcome to the universe. And if you get it through the museum's website, the museum shop, I think it's shop.amnh.org, I think they sell it there. If you get it, it's pre-signed by me. I pre-signed the books that they sell with my fancy, overpriced, purple ink, bottle-filled fountain pen.

If you don't want to jump into a textbook, there's a tiny version of it that is the, The Cliff Notes version of it is called A Brief Welcome to the Universe. So what you might do is start with that. That'll wet your appetite and then you graduate to the full-up textbook. And it's, you know, it's 400 pages. It's a full-up textbook. But it's very readable. You can sit on the couch and get lost.

It's a page turner. Yeah. I have one in my bathroom, Melinda. That's what I recommend. And it's very sequenced and very pedagogical, I should say. Very nice. All right. Well, that's excellent.

And don't read my best-selling book, Astrophysics for people in a hurry. Astrophysics for people in a hurry? Because clearly you're not in a hurry. A. B, what's in that book is me going through an entire curriculum and cherry picking the coolest, most mind-blowing things and putting it into one volume. So I skip over stuff that you don't even know. would have been there, but in a full-up curriculum in a college course, it belongs there.

But if I just want to wet people's appetite, that's what I did, cherry-picking the coolest things in the universe for that book. Very nice. Yeah, I was talking to, I was on a show yesterday and doing an interview and the host read Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. And they said, I don't care. how how much I'm not in a hurry

I still didn't get what he was talking about. So by the way, astrophobic people are like is not astrophysics for dummies. Yeah. It's real astrophysics. It's real astrophysics. For its interest level.

So, yeah, don't think it's a lesser... Yeah, don't think you're going to get in there and it's not going to be like, you know, this is the galaxy. See, galaxy, spin. Spin, galaxy, spin. It ain't doing that. Okay.

So, all right, this is Christy Giyangu or Gianju. She says, hi, Dr. Tyson and Lord Nice. This is Christy from Romania writing to you from Italy. Where do we get all these international people? Wow. I love it. Man. She says, it is possible that dark matter is.

is actually normal matter hidden in the guts of the spacetime fabric. I think she meant, is it possible? Because it's actually says it is. But is it possible? I'll read it that way. Is it possible that dark matter is actually normal matter hidden in the guts of the space time fabric? Imagine that on a space time fabric,

there are vast regions so deformed like crumpled paper ball that it is impossible to see directly the matter inside those regions. Will that explain why we can't see or feel it, but we can feel the gravitational effect? It's possible to verify this measure the time that light takes to travel through those regions of crumpled, deformed fabric, since it has no cover or larger distance than what we actually see with our telescopes. Thank you. Keep looking up. Wow.

I don't know that space time can hide things. That'd be kind of diabolical to science. The space time is hiding crucial information from the court. You know, so... Tricked you! I've imagined multiple times that maybe dark matter, which expresses gravity in our own space time, maybe dark matter is ordinary matter in a parallel universe. that's similar in an idea to you're tucking it away within folds of the space-time continuum.

If it's from another universe, then it's ordinary gravity leaking into ours, forcing us to say, oh, what is this mysterious substance? We can't see it, taste it, but it's real in another dimension. And I look forward to knowing whether or not that's true, because it would be kind of cool what it was. I would love it because to me, that theory, not theory, but that postulate says that now we got to go ahead and start, you know, investigating other universes. Yeah, except I don't want to be the first to visit them. The laws of physics are slightly different.

You could just collapse into a pile of goo on the sidewalk. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Be careful. Well, we'll send, we'll send an advanced team. Send a journal through or. Yeah, exactly, you know. All right.

This is Stephen Schultz who says, Hello, StarTalk family. Stephen Schultz from Dayton, Ohio. Thank you all for taking the time to read my question. I've recently read that the ISS is scheduled to make its fall back to Earth in 2030 or 31. Will this be something you guys plan on watching in person? Will it be possible to see it from an island in the Pacific, assuming that's where it will land?

Thank you guys for all of the amazing content. So is it going to de-orbit in 2030? Yes. Well, I think we'll probably keep it up there. You know, when you threaten to defund something, people come out of the woodwork and say, no, don't do that. Keep it going.

And by the way, what a great way. to get funding. Well, you can cut off this money, but when this thing fall out the sky, you're on your own. Yeah. So the Pacific Ocean is the great space toilet bowl on Earth.

Because the Pacific Ocean spans a third of all of Earth's longitude. It's huge. So that you can drop something out of the sky without much precision and you'll still hit the Pacific Ocean. Look at that.

Can you watch it? Yeah, go take a rowboat out to the middle of Pacific Ocean when this happens. And there's no guarantee. It will fall just over your head compared with other places. Your horizon in a rowboat might be 15 miles away. But reentering spacecraft, that horizon would be small compared to all the places it could land above your head. So, yeah, in principle, you could see it. Maybe we'd have drones out there filming it.

But most of the space station will burn up in the atmosphere, most of it. We expect that. And by the way, I'm not trying to go look at that because with my luck, it will fall on me. So I ain't trying. I like the idea of a drone filming it, though. Keep in mind that the space station was built beginning in the early 1990s. So how many years ago? That's 30 years.

If you visited someone's home and they had a television from the early 1990s, they would be the object of mockery to you. They'd also not be watching TV. Because you can't get anything on a TV from the early 90s. So technology has advanced since then. And if you sent up a space station today, it would probably look different or be much more modern than whatever we. have got going up there now. So China plans to also have like a competing space station to our own. And that's why people are a little spooked in Congress that they would have the new high ground relative to what we have enjoyed over the decades. So the real issue here, Stephen, is to get more

funding for NASA and space research because let them know that we're going to lose to China and quite frankly, they will have the upper hand militarily. Yeah. That's all it takes. That's all it takes. And then everybody will just run with it. There you go. This is Stephen Skilton.

And Stephen Skilton says, do we know the actual odds for someone, anyone to be hit by a small meteorite excluding large extinction level events? I find it amazing that only one person and Hodges has been recorded being struck by and no one else in at least 1,000 years of history has been recorded as being killed. With 8 million people on Earth, would you need to see odds on the magnitude of something like 1 trillion to 1 to help explain the lack of recorded strikes? Okay, so if we didn't have an atmosphere, you'd be dead. I would need time to do a proper calculation on this. It's a population of the Earth, how much space we take up, what the surface area is,

the fact that people aren't spread evenly around the world, that not all the meteors that strike Earth make it to Earth's surface, that they burn up. I'm going to do a proper calculation and report back. But here's something I can tell you. I was almost hit by a meteor. Did I tell you about this? Of you, of all people, if you got hit by a meteor, everybody would say, see, there is a god. So.

The universe killed the universe guy. Well, what God are you talking about? Right. Right, right, right. I was on, I think I've told this story before. Back in 1999, I was on the Brooklyn, Brooklyn, bridge in the middle of the night, maybe one in the morning, in November for the Leonid Meteor shower, which was on its 33-year cycle where you expect not a meteor shower but a meteor storm.

Comets leave debris that make meteor showers. And that debris orbits the Earth in front of and behind the comet. And Earth plows through that at the same time each year. That's why meteor showers repeat annually. All right. This meteor shower is associated with a comet as a 33-year orbital period around the sun. And if you're near where the comet had just passed the sun or just come in front of the sun,

you get extra meteorite flux coming in because all the crap that falls off a comet is closer to where the actual comet is then scattered completely in its orbit. And all this debris continues to orbit. the sun. All right. I'm on the Brooklyn Bridge with my three-year-old daughter, three-and-a-half-year-old daughter. I woke her up for this. Okay. We're there and I'm watching. We're getting a meteor every 90 seconds. Not quite storm level, but definitely satisfying. Okay. Then I'm looking up

and I see a star in the sky just appear. And it got brighter and brighter. I said, that's odd. I wonder what that is. And then it disappeared in a puff of smoke. I said, oh my God, this was a meteor headed straight for me. But in the instant I saw it, I'm thinking, gee, I wonder what this is. I was just being curious scientists until I put two and two together and then I realize the day you die from a meteor strike is the day you are staring up at a light that gets brighter and brighter and that'll be the last thing you saw in your life. So I almost hit, I think it would have hit me because I saw no streak left right or sideways and then it just simply disappeared. I was protected by Earth's atmosphere.

Thank you, pollution. What? It's not pollution. No, the atmosphere protects you without the pollution. Oh, okay. That's true. We're good. We're good.

Chuck, we only have time for one more. One more. What you got? All right. Here's the last question. It's Vail Stein. Dear Dr. Tyson and Lord Nice. My name is Vail and I'm from, and oh, wait.

My name is Vail and I'm a seven-year-old math and science kid from Philly. What up! Seven-year-old math and science kid. Okay. Wow. He says, do black holes absorb dark matter through the event horizon? And if so, would the black holes charge mass and spin change? Or can dark matter float in and out of black holes as it is not electromagnetic

and only has some of the properties that matter does? All right. First of all, let me just say this. if you are from Philly, you damn sure ain't going to Philadelphia public schools. Chuck. There's a seven-year-old asking. That question is not happening

in a Philly public school. Damn, Chuck. No, I can't. It's my home. You're from Philly. So you have, you have the brain. I can make that joke. I mean, I can make.

All right. Anyway. All right. So it turns out the only property that dark matter has that we can interact with is gravity. It doesn't have electromagnetic coupling with any of our particles. That would mean doesn't have electromagnetic forces which are required to make molecules and hold atoms together. So it has gravity. And if it has gravity, we are left with no skepticism over whether a black hole would just happily, just as happily absorb dark matter as it does regular matter. And the matter would not be able to come out any more than regular matter could because

it's responding to gravitational forces. So you can bet that a black hole sucked in all the dark matter that was just in its area. All right. But if you're at a safe distance from a black hole, it's not a giant sucking machine all of a sudden. It'll pull in anything that was close. But if the sun became a black hole, for example, we would still orbit it. It would get very cold very quickly, but we would still orbit. We're not so close that we would get sucked in.

And so there's an old saying, there's no such thing as gravity. Earth just sucks. Oh, wow. So, yeah, it's an excellent question. Wondering whether dark matter would have different properties in the vicinity of a black hole. And everything we know and understand about it tells us that it wouldn't. There it is. Now go back to your basement and keep working on a super weapon to destroy the superhero.

Exactly. Way to go, Vail. Nice, nice work, nice work. That's all the time we have for it. So always good to have you there for these. Grab bags, Jack. Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure. This has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries and another grab bag edition, which are always crowd pleaders. I am Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, as always bidding you to keep looking up.