The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Little Book of Exoplanets by Joshua N. Winn

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

The Little Book of Exoplanets by Joshua N. Winn https://amzn.to/3KZUfzS A concise and accessible introduction to exoplanets that explains the cutting-edge science behind recent discoveries For centuries, people have speculated about the possibility of planets orbiting distant stars, but only since the 1990s has technology allowed astronomers to detect them. At this point, more than five thousand such exoplanets have been identified, with the pace of discovery accelerating after the launch of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the Webb Space Telescope. In The Little Book of Exoplanets, Princeton astrophysicist Joshua Winn offers a brief and engaging introduction to the search for exoplanets and the cutting-edge science behind recent findings. In doing so, he chronicles the dawn of a new age of discovery―one that has rapidly transformed astronomy and our broader understanding of the universe. Scientists now know that many Sun-like stars host their own systems of planets, some of which may resemble our solar system and include planets similar to the Earth. But, Winn tells us, the most remarkable discoveries so far have been of planets with unexpected and decidedly un-Earth-like properties, which have upended what we thought we knew about the origins of planetary systems. Winn provides an inside view of the sophisticated detective work astronomers perform as they find and study exoplanets and describes the surprising―sometimes downright bizarre―planets and systems they have found. He explains how these discoveries are revolutionizing astronomy, and he explores the current status and possible future of the search for another Earth. Finally, drawing on his own and other scientists’ work, he considers how the discovery of exoplanets and their faraway solar systems changes our perspectives on the universe and our place in it.

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Or TikTok? Anyway, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, people of all ages, welcome to the Cirque's Tent in the Sky. As the Barnum and Bailey brothers would say it. Were they brothers? I don't know. We'll have to look that up uh check out the lawyers we're gonna be talking about planets today you ever you ever uh you ever been like me you just uh sometimes sit up late at night and it's about 3 a.m you can't sleep and you're like uh what are planets what the hell are they doing up there and they're always looking at me they're always looking at

me from the sky judging me and stuff stars and shit and i'll go out i'll go outside and i'm like hey man quit stalking me eh like why are you always watching me that big dipper is always stalking me and i'm just like hey can you guys uh look away i'm gonna go pee in the yard uh so there's always that you know it's kind of they're just always watching you, like, hey, do you guys got something else to do? Like, look at something else. It's a big universe, people. So you ever sit there and lay in bed going, what are exoplanets and planets? And what happened with that Pluto thing?

Is it a planet? Is it not a planet? When is the sun going to burn out? If you live through this summer, you know, the sun was about five feet from our planet most of the time. So these are the things that I ponder in the middle of the night, and I think you do too. And we have just the man who's come on the show for the answers in his latest book that's just come out, July 11th, 2023. And he may be correcting how close the sun was. It may have been 10 feet instead of five.

His newest book has just come out, little book of exoplanets joshua n win joins us on the show today and we're gonna have a lot of fun with this because normally we talk a lot about business and in life and novels and everything else but rarely do we get into the planets as i say uh joshua is a professor of astrophysics at princeton university it's going to be a really smart discussion ladies gentlemen and not for me because i'm just a dumb host his research goals are to explore the properties of planets like no mother of man has gone before wait is that another line and other stars uh he wants to understand how planets form and evolve and make progress on the age-old question of whether there are other planets capable of supporting life.

He's also a member of the team that built and operates NASA. You may have heard of these guys. They shoot stuff in the sky. NASA's ongoing transitioning exoplanet survey satellite mission. Welcome to the show, Josh. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on.

There you go. We did a fun little ramble, meandering thing there for you. Give us your.com so we can find you on the interwebs, please, sir. Oh, I have a Princeton University website. So if you just Google Josh Wynn Princeton, you'll be brought there. There you go. There you go. So what motivates you to you to write this book?

Well, like you said, almost everybody has had the experience at some point of looking up at the sky, seeing all those stars and wondering what's out there. Are there other planets around those stars? Are they anything like the earth? And a lot of people are surprised to find that we actually can answer a lot of those questions now. We know of more than 5,000 exoplanets, that is planets, but they don't orbit the sun. They orbit some other star in the galaxy. What's with that, man? Why do they got to be like that? They're really far away.

They're very hard to detect. And it's a booming field there it's very technology driven it really only got going in the mid-1990s it's one of the hottest fields in astronomy there you go so we're actually so good basically i wanted to provide a a complete briefing to anybody who's interested in this fast-moving scientific field. So are exoplanets basically like the normal planets we see in our little speck of the universe, but they just don't revolve around the sun then? That's the definition I want to clarify. That's right.

A planet in general is an object that's much smaller than a star, and it orbits a star. So we all grow up learning that the sun and our solar system has eight planets or you're above a certain age like me, you learned that there were nine planets. And we, you know, when you're in elementary school, you tend to learn the names of the planets and what they're like. You learn that Saturn has these beautiful rings and so on. Well, exoplanets, we know less about them. But despite that, because they're so far away, they're very hard to study.

But despite that, we've seen that there are a lot of planets that do not resemble any of the planets in the solar system. And that's part of the fun. There you go. Have you tried texting them or seeing if they have an account on Twitter? Maybe you can reach out to them that way. Communication is even harder. There you go. There you go. There you go.

So the rest of the universe, they're placed in the universe that don't roll around the sun. Yes. That's very interesting. The universe is very diverse. Yeah. Which is really interesting. So if your conception of the universe is that there's a sun, there's some planets going around it, you really need to zoom out and widen your perspective because we live inside a galaxy the milky way that has something like 100 billion stars

all circulating around the center and the milky way is one of some countless number of other galaxies there you go yeah in fact they just recently discovered a curry on the moon. India landed there. That's a joke. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. And, and Hey, uh, there's a billion people or something in India. Who knows how many people there's a lot and they're going to need curry if they go to the moon. Uh, so give us a 30,000 overview of the book. What's inside of it? Like a synopsis. Then we'll get us some of the deets. So the book is about what we know. What do we have evidence for? We all grew up with science fiction that invite us to imagine the properties of other planets and how they might be different and interesting. But what do we actually know? And how does it compare to science fiction? And where is this field going? So we talk about

how do we detect these planets? What is the evidence that they even exist? And what are they like? What would it be like if we were there looking at them? What do we know about these planets' sizes and atmospheres and that sort of thing? What they post on Instagram, yeah. Yeah, that's right. And where are we going next? Are we going to find planets just like the Earth?

How will we ever know if there's actually life on those planets? Those are the big questions that this field is approaching answers for. Are they flat like some people think the Earth is? But everyone knows the Earth is square. It's not flat. Yeah, we haven't found any flat planets. As far as we can tell, they're all spheres. But another thing is that if you zoom out and look at the solar system,

the solar system is, in a sense, flat. Really? It has all these planets, but the orbits of all those planets are all aligned with each other. Wow. Making a flat plane, and all the planets orbit within that plane. You just started a whole new conspiracy group yeah the earth is not flat but the solar system is flat yeah everyone knows the square uh the uh it it it works on the square rotation it's like a rubik's cube you know that's how the sun shifts around the earth i'm just making this up as i go along the uh the rubik's

cube that's that's why the waves in the sun, it's God shifting the Rubik's Cube as it goes around. It doesn't really spin, it's just God spinning the Rubik's Cube. Fascinating. Yeah. If NASA ever wants me to come speak there, I just made that up.

It's kind of funny, though, when you think about it, but we just probably started tuning a conspiracy nut job group. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at

chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO, and be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show. So tell us a little bit about your origin history. What made you motivated to get into this field? What made you grow up and say, hey, I want to work at NASA and do science stuff? Well, when I was a kid, I was totally into space and stargazing and learning the constellations

and reading books and magazines about the astronauts and the Apollo project and all kinds of exciting things like that. Uh, but it wasn't until much later that I decided to be an astronomer. That was not until graduate school really. And then I wasn't working on extra planets at first. In fact, nobody really was until the late 1990s. And so my, I got my degree in 2001, my doctorate, and I was working on something different, but there was just so much excitement in this field

because of all of these new technologies and new advances that I felt like it was a great time to switch over. There you go. Was it because we got better looking at the stars, like the Hubble scope and different things like that? We could see a little bit further outside of uh you know our windshield it's totally technology driven every time so all we have is starlight that's the frustrating thing about astronomy we cannot go out there and visit these other stars or bring them back for laboratory analysis so everything we

learn is only because we can analyze the light that reaches the Earth. And that's what telescopes do. Telescopes are machines for dissecting and analyzing light. And every time we come up with a new technology to make more precise measurements, we find new planets along with all kinds of other new astronomical phenomena. So, yeah, you're right that Hubble and the large telescopes that we have at our best observatories on the ground, the new space telescope, the Webb telescope, all of those are crucial for learning more about these objects. There you go. So which ones do the aliens come from? Oh, I wish I knew, right? That's one of the big motivating questions in this field is, is there life elsewhere? Are we alone?

Yeah. And I don't have an answer to that question, but it's certainly part of the answer that we are starting to learn about the planets. We think that if there is life out there, it's probably on a planet. That seems like a pretty good place for chemistry and biology to take place. And so we're learning a lot about the planets and some ways in which they resemble the Earth. But we don't yet know of any that are inhabited. And it might take us decades or more to be able to really perform a very sensitive search for life around other stars. There's got to be intelligent life in this universe because we need hope and

there's none here. So there's that intelligent part. I'm not as pessimistic as that, but I do agree that given the numbers, it would be very strange if there were not life elsewhere in the galaxy. I just said moments ago, there's a hundred billion stars, right?

That's a lot of opportunities yeah life to develop but if you ask a different question is there life within say 20 light years of the sun that is close enough for us to actually communicate within a human lifetime now you don't have hundreds of billions of stars you only have a few hundred yeah and so my intuition is doesn't tell me whether there are likely to be life or not with just a few hundred tries so maybe maybe we can get elon musk to give up that mars thing go to an exoplanet for that sounds funner that would be awesome and then the x the xo see the brand thing you know the branding because now it's X, Twitter is X. That's right. This is a sell, you should call him. Well, I mean, the sad fact is that

it's hard enough to get to Mars, right? Let alone call Elon Musk, yeah. A rocket ship going to Mars takes like a year or a year and a half or something like that with our best rockets today. To get to the nearest star, which is called Proxima Centauri, that would take about 10,000 years with one of our current best rockets. So, you know, it's not just a small technological advance that we would need. We would need a huge leap in order to be able to visit exoplanet systems. There you go. Maybe Ferrari or something.

Really suited up Ferrari. Yeah, there you go. Maybe Ferrari or something. Really suited up Ferrari. Yeah, there you go. Turbo. Extra turbo? Extra, extra, extra, extra turbo. Cool. So let's get into some more of these deets about the exoplanets, because I had never really heard about exoplanets before,

and this is the beauty of what you're bringing to us is the education. What do we need to know about exoplanets, and do they come in peace? Yeah. We'll take the first question. What do we know about them? Well, a lot of what we know about them is related to how we detect them. We have very limited knowledge about these exoplanets. I cannot show you a picture of the surface of any exoplanet. Even with our best

telescopes, we cannot see exoplanets as more than just a single point of light, and sometimes not even that. In fact, most of the time, not even that. So how do we even know they exist? The simplest way, conceptually, is eclipses. So every now and then, when planets are orbiting stars, and every now and then, a planet's orbit happens to carry it right in front of the star from our point of view. And we can't see that happening, but we can see that the starlight drops a little bit in brightness when the planet is blocking some of the light. And then that goes away. And every time the planet wheels around, we get another little dip in brightness. And we've gotten very good at measuring the brightness of

stars precisely. So in fact, most of the exoplanets we know about come through that method, the method. And so what do we learn? Well, we learned how big the planet is, from how much the light drops, how much light. And we learn how long it takes to go around because we can see it repeating over and over and we can measure the time between those events. So those are the two most fundamental things we can learn. The size of the planet and the time it takes to go around the star. And we have planets the size of the Earth. We takes to go around the star. And

we have planets the size of the Earth, we have planets the size of Jupiter, and we have everything in between. We also have planets that are at Earth like distances from the sun. And we have planets that are much farther away hundreds of times the distance, the Earth to the sun. and we know of planets that are extremely close to their stars, almost ridiculously close, with orbits only 1 100th of the size of the Earth's orbit. So they're parked so close to the star. Wow. And is the

orbital pattern of the stars and the exoplanets, is it similar to ours? I mean, at least in some way or another, where they revolve around each other? Is it sometimes they're just hanging out or something? They're similar in that the planets revolve around a star. That's pretty much guaranteed by the basic laws of physics. But they're very unlike the solar system in the patterns like for example if you pick a random star like the sun there's a one in three chance that it has a miniature version of the solar system where

all the planets are crammed in to what would be venus's orbit or mercury's orbit around the sun so you might have five or six planets but their orbits are all tiny and so that's very unlike the solar system, which is much more spread out. And there is a small chance, like a 1% chance, that it has a Jupiter-sized planet, but it's really close to the star. It's orbiting just about as close as it is physically possible to be to the star. That's a whole new category of planets called hot Jupiters. Hot Jupiters? Yeah.

I think I saw some of those on Tinder. Yeah, that's right. Very hot Jupiters. And we don't know where they came from. from in fact there was a very uh well well investigated theory of planet formation that said such planets should be impossible and yet they were the earliest type of planets that were discovered wow do you just uh hey let me ask two dumb questions uh go ahead uh well i i'm having some fun here so is is it do we uh you know we're made up of what matter or whatever the hell it is or atoms and stuff is in oxygen and you know do you need an environment like ours to create some form of life whether it's based on how we're based or or or not or is there

is there life on other planets that like is you know like worms or molecular crap or you know it's a good question it's not a dumb question it's kind of the big question i flunk science yeah but the answer is we don't we don't know okay if we knew how life got started on the earth, we'd be in much better shape because we could look for those same necessary conditions here elsewhere. But we don't even know how life got started on the earth. Yeah, but isn't there a book about it 2,000 years ago or something? No, I'm just kidding. There are various opinions, but there are some clues, right? It seems pretty clear that life started in the oceans because that's where the most ancient fossils come from. And that's where the most, you know, there's a progression of life in the earliest stages seem to have been in the oceans.

So our working assumption is that you need liquid water in order to have a chance of forming at least earth-like creatures yeah that's what my doctor tells me eight classes a day so that's why we get really excited whenever we discover an exoplanet that seems capable of having liquid water oceans that is it's small enough that we think it probably has a solid surface it's not like jupiter or saturn that's all gas and it's the right distance from the star so the temperature allows for water to be liquid instead of freezing if it's too far away or boiling if it's if it's too close evaporating probably too yeah so that part that concept is called the habitable zone. If we find an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of its star, then we get very excited because that is a potential place where life might arise. There you go.

To me, it's just so interesting. I remember as a kid looking at the stars. I used to shoot off the Estes rockets. Oh, yeah. I love NASA. I think i had the space shuttle at one point and i you know uh i don't know how old you are probably around my age but we grew up in that in that golden era of the space shuttle and how magical that was um and uh

you know it just rockets and space travel and and all the all the really cool stuff. What's the future hold for us? I imagine NASA's working on more. I know they have a new advanced telescope that's bringing back incredible images. They're probably just going to keep, you know, they're probably going to be like Canon, where they just keep coming out with better resolution. Like I said, it's all technology driven. So the here and now, like you said, is this new space telescope. It's called the James Webb Space Telescope. It's much better in many ways than the Hubble Space Telescope.

And one of the things it's good at is not only detecting the evidence for planets, but measuring the contents of their atmospheres. It can tell us whether a certain planet has, you know, methane in its atmosphere or carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide. It can measure some of the molecules that exist in the atmospheres of these planets. That's happening now. It's very exciting. There you go. Hey, to fall back to what we mentioned, hop back a bit in the conversation about water. Is that half the reason they're looking for water on the moon?

And see if maybe they can find some semblance of life? Or is it just, you know, make a way station? No, it is the reason why everybody's looking for water on Mars. Because Mars, you know, is arguably habitable. It's colder than the Earth, but it's not outrageously colder so maybe early in its history it did have liquid water oceans and they lost for some reason so people look for water on mars because they're looking for life but on the moon we already know there is water but there's so little of it it's incredibly dry yeah it doesn't have an atmosphere

at all it's very uninhabitable. So the reason that I've read anyways that the space program is so excited about water is because one day that might be useful as a fuel or a type of, in order to sustain a base. There you go. In order to provide, I guess, drinking water and water for other uses of a permanent base on the moon. And you can also imagine doing other things with water that would be useful, using it to store energy, for example. Well, when I was growing up, the cartoon said the moon was made of cheese. So can they squeeze some of that cheese and get the water out of it? Yeah, the cheese hypothesis has pretty much been ruled out.

Damn it. I've got to read much been ruled out. Damn it. I got to read the news more often. I'm like people are with politics. They don't pay attention to what's going on and then they find stuff out. It's not cheese. Damn it. Now I'm not going to be hungry anytime I look at the moon anymore.

Getting back to your question about is water really essential? The truth is we don't know we need to keep an open mind because we don't understand life on the earth but at the same time like we have to start somewhere we have to prioritize certain planets for the search and we might as well do look for the ones that where where it evidently worked at least once all planets that are that resemble the Earth. That's the thinking, anyways.

We can see if lightning struck twice, maybe. I don't know. I think we need a telescope to look back on our planet and try and find intelligent life. I'm a big purveyor of the George Carlin bit. Yeah, everybody's heard of Carl Sagan, right? Carl Sagan, in 1993, he pretended to do that. He pretended with his group to be alien astronomers looking back at the Earth, searching for life.

They used data from a spacecraft called Galileo that was really exploring Jupiter. But incidentally, it got some data looking back at the Earth. And so Sagan and his group kind of pretended, well, let's say we only have this data. Would we know that Earth is inhabited? And it's actually not obvious. It's not so easy to detect, but what they pointed out is that you can see that there's oxygen in our atmosphere, along with other molecules that really shouldn't be there for very long, unless there's some process that's constantly putting it there. And so they took that as

kind of evidence that Earth really does have life. And that inspires a lot of people to, as a way of finding life on other exoplanets. If we see oxygen in the atmosphere of some Earth-like exoplanet, maybe that's because there are plants on that exoplanet that are constantly putting oxygen in the atmosphere, just as plants here do that for the Earth. There you go. You know, what were the chances, you know, recently NASA did that thing where they sent a thing to an asteroid?

Yeah, they slammed a little rocket into an asteroid. That was pretty damn cool. I agree. It was cool to watch it down to the last second. You're just like, this is awesome, man. That's right. It goes closer and closer and then static comes to the screen. Turned into a whole one movie with Bruce Willis in a documentary.

That was awesome. What's the chances we can have that anytime soon with an exoplanet? Like I said, it's not going to happen soon. Unless we're totally wrong about the laws of physics and we can invent some kind of hyperdrive. We don't know any technology that will get us to distant stars that's way outside the solar system within a human lifetime. Yeah. Maybe we need to create like a breeding farm, put people on a planet and they just keep breeding as the,

as the plane flies and their grandkids will land on Mars or something. It's a great concept from, from science fiction. That is sure. You just build a multi-generational spaceship. So yeah, it's 10,000 years to get there, but maybe somebody will still be alive on the spaceship when it arrives.

There you go. And we'll remember why they were sent in the first place. Why are we here? I don't know. Mom said it was important. Because even the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is a little more than four light years away. So even if we could travel the speed of light, it's four years to get there. And we cannot travel the speed of light.

We can only go much slower than that with our current technology. There you go. Well, maybe the only problem is halfway through, somebody will probably get divorced and get sick of each other and want to move out. And that would cause problems in Toronto. 10,000 years is a long time for a group. Tube in the sky. Yeah, that is a long time.

I mean, I know people who can't get five years in a marriage. So there you go. What have we talked about or what have we touched on that we should tease out about the book well a lot of the book is talking about some of my favorite exoplanets and oh so you have favorites how do we how do we know about their properties and and why are they why are they weird because you know i've been talking so far about the search for earth-like planets and that's great but actually a lot of what i do personally in my research group is about the weird planets the ones that we are not we're not expecting and uh don't really have any analogs here in the solar

system so kind of the kinky ones then yeah that's right so it's an only fans going on yeah so there's uh there's a lot of them so for example there is a planet uh it goes by the bizarre name of koi 1843.03 oh i know that one yeah yeah and it is so close to its star that it goes around not every year it goes around every four and a quarter hours so the year on this planet is only about four and a quarter hours of on the earth time it's so close that the gravity from the star is is probably distorting the planet so it's not a sphere it's really elongated kind of like a football oh wow so it's right on the brink of being destroyed of disintegrating because of the gravitational field from the star and yet there it is and it's probably been orbiting there for billions of years wow so how did that planet

get there you know what caused it it probably didn't form there it's it's too close to the star so but if it formed farther away like the planets in the solar system what pushed it there and then why did it stop why didn't it just fall into the star so that's the kind of question i find interesting that and and it's it's teaching us something about planet formation and all the things that can happen within a planetary system even if they didn't happen in the solar system. You know, I just think I solved the mystery of the universe in what you're talking about. Why did the star stop there and stuff?

Yeah. God is playing pool. And if you've ever played the game of pool, I was just playing this the other day. Sometimes you hit the balls and the rack just goes, and it goes everywhere. I like that stuff stops in random places. That's right. So that's a nice metaphor for one of the theories. Yeah.

So a lot of exoplanet systems have planets on weird orbits, like really short period orbits, really misshapen orbits that are, that are more like elongated ellipses than circles and a lot of the theories for how that happens is kind of like playing pool you take a bunch of planets but they have encounters with each other yeah and if two planets come close enough together they can actually smash into each other or they can at least deflect each other's orbits because of their own gravity and that might be what is randomizing the orbits in some of these exoplanet systems.

That's what those asteroids are that come shooting through the thing, go by us, and we're like, whoa, holy crap. You know, movies. That's right. If you have, in other planetary systems where you have a lot of giant planets, maybe more than we do here, those kind of interactions might be more common. Yeah. And it's just God, you know know whacking the cue ball and the nine ball and uh you know putting it he's trying to he there's probably black holes see look i've solved the mystery of the universe right here i

did it right here on the show you've heard it first people so the black holes are the cue pockets of the billiards table and god's like just trying to knock him in there and that's why asteroids you know you should astro shoot as god he's knocked that thing he's trying to hit the uh that uh corner there of the black hole i love black holes yeah those are amazing movies great i wish yeah you saw the movie interstellar i i've uh yeah center stellar in the black hole movie yeah that's a great, fairly recent sci-fi movie. And one of the big plot points is that there's a planet, and it's around a star, but it's in the vicinity of a black hole.

And that plays tricks with time and space and so on that are important for the movie. And I would love to know if there are really planets that are orbiting more near black holes. We don't have any yet. But we are in a position to start searching. The techniques that we have for finding exoplanets, it's kind of a long shot, but some of them might apply to systems with a black hole. So for example,, just a couple of years ago, maybe even just one year ago, a sun-like star was discovered orbiting around a more massive black hole. And this was kind of the first time a normal star like the sun was found orbiting a black hole

at such a distance that the star is not in any danger at all. But nevertheless, there's a black hole right there. And we are capable of searching for planets around that sun-like star using the same techniques we use for other stars. So it's possible that someday with systems like that, we will find planets that are kind of like the interstellar planetary system. That was a cool movie, you know, the interstellar planetary system that was a cool movie you know the different variations of the planet he was going to a and then uh it was kind

of interesting i saw the news items that india landed on the moon for cheaper than it was to make that movie which i didn't know that about the cost yeah they did it for 75 million and i think it costs more than that to make interstellar. And so, yeah, it was a news item that went around that they landed on the moon for cheaper than what it took to make that movie. But, you know, he went to more different planets, so I think that was why it cost more. So there you go, just like we were saying. But if NASA ever wants my help with the billiard theory of the universe, I'm always available. I'll make a note of it. Just let the higher-ups know.

I did flunk science, though, and biology, and most of the English, and second grade. I think that's the callback joke of the show we've been using for years. You know how to ask good questions, and that's super important.

God playing billiards, which probably explains the first half of the Bible. Anyway, I don't know what that means. But this has been really insightful, a lot of fun, Josh. And people should read this, all the kidding aside and entertainment aside. This is fun. I love, you know, one of my favorite things to do is when I drive between Vegas and California. When I was a kid, as Boy Scouts, we used to go up in the U.N.S. And, you know, once you can get outside of cities and lights and stuff

and you can really see the universe you can see the milky way you can see the big dipper and the little dipper and you can really see the universe you know you don't you don't really get it when you're living in these big cities and areas and uh it's just so beautiful and it reminds you of how small your place is in the universe. Astronomy is good for that. Yeah. I agree. The night sky is this just breathtaking work of art

that humans have enjoyed for millions of years until very recently. Yeah. We've been polluting the sky with our own light and hiding this Michelangelo-type work of art that's over our heads. Yeah. I can't see the stars anymore through the cold dusk. Hey, Beijing, keep it down there, buddy. So there you go.

So my final question for you is, you know, I'm single, I'm on Tinder and, you know, the girls always want to know what your sign is. Is the exoplanet going to help me at all getting laid? Or is my exoplanet due with my Aquarius sign there or anything like that? No comment. I'm not an expert in that area of exoplanet science.

And astrology, because I'm a water sign, eh? Well, I need to find an exoplanet that's a water sign i think that has to be how it's going to work there well uh josh it's been fun and interesting and insightful insightful and excitable both i don't know insightful is that a word uh clearly i flunked english too uh to have you on the show very fun and people should order up your book learn about where it's at this might be a great uh maybe get that Cameron dude, James Cameron, to make a movie about exoplanets. That would sure ratchet up

the interest level. Maybe you could have those Avatar people go to the exoplanet. Maybe they're on one. You never know. That's Avatar 3. So thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it. Thanks for your curiosity. There you go. And Gibbister.com, so people can

find you on the internet, please. I don't have a fancy website or anything like that. Okay. I've heard of that Princeton place, though. Yeah. You'll find me. Yeah. It's been around for a little while.

The Little Book of Exoplanets. I hope some of your listeners will enjoy it. Pick it up and make it a great gift to give away for this upcoming Christmas. The Little Book of Exoplanets. The more you know, the more fun you know. pick it up and make it a great gift to give away for this upcoming christmas the little book of exoplanets the more you know the more fun you know and if you ever get tired you know like i like you know i i lay up at night and i'm like uh hey what's going on stars eh what's going on and they haven't talked back yet at least not to the one of the voices in my head uh we can't talk about the other 10 personalities but there you go or order up wherever fine books are sold, and as always

folks, for further show to your family, friends, and relatives go to goodreads.com, fortuneschrisfoss linkedin.com, fortuneschrisfoss youtube.com, fortuneschrisfoss and chrisfoss1 on tiktok thanks for tuning in, be good to each other stay safe, we'll see you guys next time