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Scichat: Exploring Exoplanets with Dr. Nora Bailey

• Jason Zackowski

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Join us on an incredible voyage through the cosmos, where the extraordinary Dr. Nora Bailey, host of Nora's Guide to the Galaxy, unveils the enigmatic world of exoplanets. Your curiosity will be thoroughly satiated as Dr. Nora shares her captivating journey from academia to studying these alien worlds, her love for planets from her favorite sci-fi stories, and the intriguing mystery of the Wow signal. With every moment, you'll find yourself more engrossed in the immensity of our universe.

Brace yourself for a thrilling detour to the moon as we explore the groundbreaking Artemis Mission and its surprising Canadian connection. We dive into riveting details about the powerful Space Launch System rocket and the mission's ambitious goal of sending the first woman and a diverse group to the moon. Ever wondered about tilted binary planets and the potential they hold for life as we know them? We've got you covered, with insights that will make you rethink what we know about our universe.

To lighten the mood, we reflect on our favorite science fiction authors, our guests' pet rabbits, and discuss the pivotal role of space programs for children.

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Speaker 1:

Hello Science Enthusiasts. My name is Jason Zakowski. I'm the dog dad of Bunsen Beaker, the Science Dogs on social media.

Speaker 2:

My co-host is Hi there, I'm Chris Zakowski and I am the dog mum to Bunsen Beaker and the cat mum to Ginger.

Speaker 1:

Every week in SciChat we bring you an amazing expert to enthrall you with their area of knowledge. We may tell a bad pun here or there, so with our great pleasure to welcome to SciChat Dr Nora Bailey, known as Nora's Guide to the Galaxy Doc. How are you doing?

Speaker 3:

Hello, I'm good, how are you doing?

Speaker 1:

I am so good, so you're a space doc, is that correct?

Speaker 3:

Yes.

Speaker 1:

Yes, so you're the continuum of like medical doctor to doctor who. Where are you on that continuum?

Speaker 3:

You know closer to doctor who than you might think, wish I had the second heart, though.

Speaker 1:

Oh Touche, you mentioned you're in LA. That's where you're calling in from.

Speaker 3:

Yes, yes, castina, actually.

Speaker 1:

Have you lived there most of your life? Are you there for work?

Speaker 3:

Oh no, I just moved here in. October or September.

Speaker 1:

No, I introduced you as you have a doctorate. What's your training in science?

Speaker 3:

Yes, so my doctorate, I studied exoplanets and I studied the dynamics of exoplanets, so the motion of planets under gravity in systems, not the solar system, even though the solar system is also very interesting in that aspect as well. So I did that at the University of Chicago.

Speaker 1:

You know, when you were little, were you did you have the classic space person origin story where you walked out into the night sky and you're like whoa. I need to learn more about this.

Speaker 3:

You know I don't think I have any, like you know, lightning strike moment. I think. Maybe I lived in the city-ish when I was very small. I don't really like remember looking at the night sky that much. I remember learning about space in school and thinking it was super cool and just like kind of had that little kid like, oh, wow, like this is me. I loved learning about all the planets, so I always thought space was very cool. But I don't think I really had like a single moment where I was like, yes, this is it. It was just kind of it was just a cool thing.

Speaker 1:

So why? Why exoplanets in your doctorate, Like did? Is it just because they're alien worlds? Do you like? What was about it? What was the?

Speaker 3:

other. I just I read too much science fiction probably. Okay, I don't know. I just I think it's such a cool field and it's such a young field. So I mean, like I remember learning about exoplanets when I was an undergraduate and now I was a non-traditional graduate student, so I didn't go to graduate school right after undergrad. So my undergraduate, you know, the Kepler telescope hadn't launched yet. Like we knew of, you know, a few hundred exoplanets. But it was like kind of a footnote in my astrophysics class and I was like wow, this seems really cool, like how exciting that we're going to learn more about this. And then, you know, when I was doing other things, kepler launched, we discovered thousands of exoplanets. By the time I went back to grad school I was like I had already been interested in exoplanets. But now I was like wow, like this is just such an exciting field to be a part of and to see growing so much.

Speaker 1:

Isn't that wild Like within your, your education time, exoplanets went from literally science fiction to every star we look at has one around it kind of thing.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's crazy there was. There was no known exoplanets when I was born, so I'll date myself that much.

Speaker 1:

Oh, my goodness, I love thinking about worlds around other stars made famous, you know like. There's the Avatar movies, which they they take place around other stars, and of course there's Tatooine and Star Wars. Do you have a favorite planet from science fiction, either like movies, TV shows or books?

Speaker 3:

Um, I kind of do, but you know this is a great question because I don't know that I've ever been asked this before. So I didn't have like an answer prepared, but the first thing that popped into my head was the planet Pern, which hardly counts as a science fiction planet because there are dragons, but it is a science fiction planet. There is also spaceships. So, yeah, I would go with Pern. I want to ride a dragon.

Speaker 1:

There you go. Okay, that's great Spaceships and dragons in the same universe. I'll have to check that out.

Speaker 3:

Exactly what? What a better combination than that.

Speaker 1:

The planet, pern. Okay, so we got a little bit of a framework and I'll just do a reset for people that are joining. Well, welcome to SciChat. We have a guest that we run through some questions with. It's the very awesome Dr Nor Bailey, host of Nor's Guide to the Galaxy, and then we open up the floor to questions from the audience. Feel free, if you want, to leave comments and questions in the chat bubble on Twitter, which is in the bottom right hand corner. I think we're calling it the chubble. Is that the new term, chris? I don't know. And if you're on Facebook live, hello, we are multicasting to Facebook live. You can type in a con comment because, yeah, you cannot speak on Facebook live. So a little bit of reset there. Chris, do you have a question for Nora?

Speaker 2:

Yes, dr. Nor can you tell us a little bit more about the wow signal, the mysterious message from the stars.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, definitely. So I recently made a video about this on my YouTube channel. I think the wow signal is super exciting because it I mean I want to be very upfront about this and not saying it's aliens.

Speaker 1:

But it is the most interesting, it's not aliens. No.

Speaker 3:

Well, I mean it could be. It is the most intriguing signal we've seen in the search for extraterrestrial life and it has not been explained, and I think whether or not it's aliens, you know. If it's aliens, that's obviously fascinating, but even if it's something astrophysical, that's still very interesting, because we don't know what it would be and we don't really have an explanation for it. So either way, if we can ever explain the signal, we could learn more about the universe. Unfortunately, that might be a very difficult thing to do because we only got this once, back in the seventies, and has never repeated, despite quite a lot of effort searching that area of the sky for a repeat signal. So we may never know. This could be a great mystery that never gets solved. But you know, if you like unsolved mysteries, I think this is an exciting one.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So what picked up the signal? Like some guy you know in a satellite dish somewhere, or something rather important.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so this was picked up by a telescope that was called the Big Ear, which was, I believe it, ohio State University, and it was part of their study program.

Speaker 3:

So study is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and kind of really kicked off in, at least in its modern form, by Frank Drake and others back in kind of the sixties timeframe. And so, yeah, so they, they had this radio telescope and they were like, let's use this to search for radio signals from other intelligent civilizations, because you know, our own civilization is admitting radio signals, so it makes sense that another civilization might also be doing that. And so this telescope just kind of listened. It was called the Big Ear, you know it was just listening to the universe, it was a stationary telescope, so it just rotated with the rotation of the earth and kind of swept out, you know, over the sky that way. And, yeah, then one day it just bang this crazy signal. That was just crazy levels of signal to noise, super strong signal. That lasted, you know, just for a brief period of time, and then it went away and never came back.

Speaker 1:

And as of yet, it's unexplained.

Speaker 3:

It is unexplained.

Speaker 1:

Yes, so it could be like jib jab from planet Nibbilon just turned on some kind of thing to screw with us and then got in trouble and turned it off again.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, exactly, you know, maybe it was some it could have, potentially and obviously I'm not saying that I think this is necessarily what it was but it could potentially be some sort of you know, meti signal. Meti is messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence. This is something we've done a couple of times in human history where we've sent out signals that we, you know, in theory might be intercepted by another civilization, so other civilizations might be doing the same thing. There wasn't any you know encoded information in it as far as we could tell. There wasn't, you know, like a radio signal that has, you know AM or FM, has signals encoded in it.

Speaker 3:

There was none of that. It was just a very strong blast basically in this radio frequency. But one of the things that was really interesting about the frequency that they found it at is that it was basically right at something that's been called the the watering hole frequency, because it is a frequency that a lot of people have postulated would be kind of commonly looked to by intelligent civilizations who were potentially interested in communicating. So to have this happen near that frequency, you know it's just a very tantalizing thing to say, oh, okay, well, maybe someone else out there was following the same thought process that we were, but you know, maybe not.

Speaker 1:

When we send radio signals into space. I read or I heard and that's the dangerous thing, I heard from somebody who told me from somebody that our radio signals degrade, like they get all all smashed and gibbled up in outer space. So yeah, so if I had a very, very powerful thing and I shouted like YOLO into the universe, like it might get Smacked up by the time somebody listens to it many, many, many light years away. Is that I'm on something there, or is that wrong?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think that's correct. I, you know, wouldn't know the details off the top of my head, but okay.

Speaker 3:

I mean one one thing to keep in mind with radio signals I mean with with general signals in general is, as you know, the radio signals propagating outward is kind of spreading out, kind of along the surface of a sphere that you could think of it right, so that like strength of a signal is going down as the distance squared, so it falls off in strength really rapidly and, yeah, and there's all sorts of things that could cause interference with that signal and so the farther it travels it's getting very weak and it's getting very interfered with. So yeah, I would think that it would be difficult to have like a Coherent radio signal that was strong, very strong for a very long distance. But I don't know, you know the details.

Speaker 1:

Can you imagine the fervor that would envelop the earth if a signal was Decoded like wouldn't that be but the most bananas day in the history of everything?

Speaker 3:

It would be crazy. I mean I, although you know, I kind of wonder these days if we would ever actually agree that, that it was a signal and Decoded. I mean it would have to be something so so clear that everyone could agree on it. And I mean, I don't everyone doesn't agree on anything, but so I think that would be very challenging to to reach a consensus there, but it's possible, you know I.

Speaker 1:

Love it. Go ahead, chris.

Speaker 2:

Yes, thank you so much. What can you tell me about? The Artemis Mission is very exciting. Oh, my computer is talking to me so it was giving sound effects. Uh, what, we just had our Calories down peed and Jeremy Hansen is a Canadian and he will be part of the Artemis mission. I was just wondering. I know I just love him. We actually listen to him speak.

Speaker 1:

He literally looks like if Bud Bud Lightyear came to life. He's got the cleft chin and everything.

Speaker 2:

We listen to him speak in Jasper, alberta, for the dark skies conference and just his message of Setting goals and telling people your goals and reaching your goals. He's just so inspirational. So it's just very cool that he's going up With the, with the Artemis mission, but could you tell us a little bit more about that?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean the Artemis mission is it's kind of this whole family of missions that NASA is doing to put people back on the moon, and I mean we haven't been to the moon in in decades, nobody has. We're the only country that has that people to the moon and and yeah, we're going back, and I think that's really exciting in and of itself.

Speaker 3:

It's also going to be very historic because it's going to send someone other than a white man to the moon for the very first time, which is which is long overdue, and I'm really excited to see, yeah, the first woman land on the moon. And that's part of the inspiration for the name of the program, actually, because Artemis is a palo's transistor.

Speaker 2:

And, yes, I'm very excited about that as well. Yeah, the Canadian connection, but it does. There is an amazing and diverse group that is going, which is awesome.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, very, very exciting and and it's also a stepping stone, right. So the dream is to go to Mars and To to be able to go to Mars, I think to the. The logic behind NASA's thought process is, you know, we need to be able to go to the moon as well, in very reliable manner, before we can kind of plan on going to Mars. So Artemis is is a stepping stone to an eventual crewed Mars mission, which would be obviously just super exciting and and and it also uses a new rocket. So the space launch system I'm trying to think of a good adjective for it. They long be devils based on the system, perhaps I would say.

Speaker 3:

So I think development of SLS started gosh, 2010 timeframe I don't know the exact day off to set my head, but and just delayed, delayed, delayed and had quite a lot of issues, even up to the wet dress rehearsal testing for the Artemis One mission. So they rolled the whole rocket out to the launch pad and they were going through kind of a fake countdown to test everything out and it didn't work. And they tried it, I think, four different times and it did not work every single time. And yet they still were like we think we solved everything. We're going to go ahead with Artemis One. I was very nervous about this. To be honest, at the time I was I was questioning this, but it actually did work successfully.

Speaker 3:

So it was really exciting to see the first ever launch of the SLS, which is very powerful rocket and will be continued to use throughout the mission. However, it will not get people to the surface of the moon. So to do that, there's a kind of complicated setup where the SLS is going to take people to a lunar orbit. There's going to be a station in lunar orbit called Lunar Gateway, and then, from Lunar Gateway, there's going to be another craft which has been, I believe, rewarded under two different contracts to SpaceX and to Blue Origin, to create these kind of human landing systems for the moon. So there's going to be a separate rocket that takes them from the gateway down to the lunar surface, and that will hopefully be happening in the 2030s, and this is still going to be a little while.

Speaker 1:

So Artemis Two, the one that our Canadian guys own, that one's not landing on the moon, it's just they're going to be on the rocket and go around the moon and wave at it, or something like.

Speaker 3:

Yes, yeah, so this was kind of a similar thing was done with the Apollo missions. So Apollo 8 kind of had a similar thing where they went and they went around the moon and was a very cool mission. There was actually a book about it. I went to like a panel for the book release, which was very cool. Anyway, I think I have it on my shelf, it's called Rocketman. But yeah, so Apollo 8 had the same kind of idea where, you know, you want to test your ability to put something into this. You know, you know Translunar orbit, before you try and do the whole shebang of landing people on the moon. And so Artemis Two is going to do that same thing. It's basically going to test the capability of the rocket to get to the moon. But they're not going to be landing on the moon, they're just going to be going around it.

Speaker 1:

OK, so I have another question about something that's your specialty, and that's these weird, weirdo binary planety things. I watched one of your YouTube videos. It's called Tilted Binary Planets. What, yes, what, the heck, how?

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

How, what, what are they? Why are they Like maybe, maybe I'll let you explain it. You're the expert.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, this one was a little bit of a I want to say less practical, it's more on the theoretical side of things. But this was this was something I was interested in. I mean, I've been interested in dynamics, obviously it was what I studied. But someone had asked me if you could have a binary planet that was on kind of this like tilted orbit, so that the plane of the orbit of the planets with one another is kind of perpendicular to their orbit around the star. So a binary planet is basically just imagine if the moon was another planet instead of being small enough to be considered a moon. It's that kind of idea, right? So there's two planets that are pretty close together, they're in this like orbit and then as a like larger gravitational body, you can consider them being an orbit around the star. And I was.

Speaker 3:

My first initial reaction to this question was to say I think you could, as long as you're far enough away from the star, because kind of the farther away you get from the star, the more and more you can kind of consider the binary planets as a point source, as a point mass, and not have to take into account the effects of their own orbit.

Speaker 3:

But I was actually thinking about that, and so that was kind of fun to dive into because I wanted to make sure that I was, you know, answering the question correctly. And I was just interested to find out, like was, was there a distance that you could kind of move away from the star to be able to ignore the fact that it was a binary planet? And it turns out that you really can't, and that's because of something called the Kozai leadoff effect, which is has been known since the 60s. But basically, if you have a really tilted orbit of something, that orbit can basically swap between being very tilted and being very elliptical, and the more it's tilted, the more elliptical it can be, and the the peak of this effect happens if you have a perfectly perpendicular orbit, which was just the situation that I had been asked about. So you kind of get the strongest effect from Kozai leadoff effect here. So that means you can make the orbit so elliptical that it basically collides with the star.

Speaker 1:

Oh no, that's not good.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so that becomes very destabilizing.

Speaker 1:

So this orbit kind of looks like a hot dog then.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah. So it becomes basically just so long and skinny that the fact that the sun has some distance to it becomes important and what happens? And you know. So my initial thought was, as you were farther away from the star, right, you can kind of ignore the effects of the binary orbits more and more, and that's true. But what happens? Actually, it only affects the time scale, so it takes longer for that to happen as you move farther away from the star, but it still happens. And on time scales that are longer compared to, you know, if it was close to the star, but still pretty short compared to, you know, any sort of planetary system lifetime. So so, yeah, and so that would not be a stable configuration, pretty much.

Speaker 1:

All right. So thank you for explaining that, because I think I would have had to watch the video a second time to to get that. It's a little esoteric, right, but something something that's less esoteric is the fact that binary planets exist Like. Do we know this for a fact or is that theoretical?

Speaker 3:

Well, that's a great question. We've not detected, say, like exoplanets that have binary systems that we know of, because it would certainly be difficult to tell that from our detection methods. Like, for example, if you had a binary planet and say you were detecting it via the radial velocity method, you would probably just think it was a planet with a mass of the combined planet.

Speaker 1:

If there are one big, chunky planet not too separate. Yeah, exactly, oh, okay.

Speaker 3:

So so that would be pretty difficult to detect. I'm sure there are ways you could do it, especially probably with the transit method, if you got really lucky with the configurations and the timings and everything. I am not an observational astronomer so I would not know the details of what that like like curve would look like.

Speaker 1:

But in our own solar system.

Speaker 3:

Now, officially, there is not a binary planet.

Speaker 1:

Oh, I see we're going with this.

Speaker 3:

I think that there is. I personally think that well, not binary planets, binary dwarf planets. So, depending on how you want to define a binary planet and there's not an accepted official definition for this I personally think it kind of makes sense if the center of mass of the two bodies is outside of either one of the bodies. So that's not the case for the Earth and the Moon, right, the Earth and the Moon are orbiting one another, but the center of their orbit is within the radius of the Earth. That is not the case for Pluto and its largest Moon, caren. They're very similar well, I shouldn't say very similar but they have pretty similar masses on astronomical scales and their center of mass is definitely not within Pluto at all. So I think that you could consider Pluto and Caren to be a binary dwarf planet, for sure, but the IAU does not agree with me, I guess.

Speaker 1:

No, but this I mean. They're of similar size. So when you say the center of the orbit wouldn't be inside Pluto, it'd be like somewhere kind of in between them, but closer to Pluto, like a.

Speaker 3:

Yep exactly.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I'm trying to remember my very my undergrad physics here, so here's a bigger question that brings it home for everybody, and feel free to speculate wildly, doc. What would life be like on Earth, though, if the Moon was of similar size and we were in this binary dance?

Speaker 3:

That's an interesting question. I'm not sure that it would be that different, because Our moon is actually very large. To begin with, it's not large enough to, I think, be considered a binary planet, although there are some definitions of a binary planet which you could fit the moon and the Earth into. But yeah, the moon is an abnormally large well, abnormally compared to the rest of the solar system. I don't know if that's abnormal in a universal scale, but it's an abnormally large moon.

Speaker 3:

So we kind of have already gotten a lot of the effects that I think you would see like, for example, when the people talk about a lie is that the moon can kind of perhaps stabilize the obliquity of the Earth. That is its axial tilt, which obviously has a pretty large effect on seasons and everything. That's the reason we have seasons is our axial tilt. So the moon has definitely a role to play there. I think if it was a pair of binary planets, for one thing they would probably be tightly locked with one another. So right now the moon is tightly locked to the Earth. So that's why we always see the same side of the moon right. That's why there is a dark side of the moon which is figuratively, not literally, dark. But the Earth is not tightly locked to the moon. So from the surface of the moon you would see the Earth rotating. You'd see all the different sides of the Earth over time. But if the moon was larger and they were kind of more of equal size, they would be kind of tightly locked to one another. So the moon would always see the same place on the Earth and the Earth would always see the same place on the moon, so that would just be very different. I think it would be a very different experience for us here on Earth.

Speaker 3:

And then I think the other thing is that I mean, then you would probably be looking at a habitable world, right? There's no reason to think that if the moon was the size of the Earth, it wouldn't also be a habitable planet, which has huge implications, I think, for our space race. And what kind of the last 100 years would have gone like? We talk a lot about colonizing Mars, and Mars is very inhospitable to humans. What if there was a planet that was right next door that we thought was habitable? I think that would have a big effect on motivations and goals and plans from nations.

Speaker 1:

Wow, can you imagine Just trying to think during the space race, the current reality. We send explorers to this moon. That's actually habitable. We land there and they don't have any space race. And they're like what's with you guys? And they're like oh, we just really got into the Sopranos and we never got past whatever was in the 60s. We got really into reality TV. Sorry, we didn't develop a space race.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, maybe there would have been a whole independent evolutionary path on the moon. I'm not a biologist so I don't know the details there.

Speaker 1:

We all decided to get along, so we didn't have to decide to send things into space, because that's what the space race was, or it was based on a whole bunch of military stuff.

Speaker 3:

And then we would laugh at them and say jokes on you. We own your planet now, oof.

Speaker 1:

That would be rough. Yes, ok, so that is so very, very cool. I've been thinking about that since I knew you were going to be a guest. That was a question I had for you for sure. So, as we kind of round out the last 10 minutes of the interview before we open up the floor to questions from the audience, both Chris and I we've put some of your stuff up in the nest. You have a YouTube channel called Nora's Guide to the Galaxy. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your social media presence, the stuff you do there and on TikTok and everywhere.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely. So I started my science communications icon stuff when I was in grad school. I just had so much fun doing it, really enjoyed. I don't know, I think teaching is maybe the wrong word. I don't necessarily consider myself a teacher. I think I'm actually kind of bad teacher, which is like communicating really is the right word for it. But just getting people excited about space to me that's awesome and I had so much fun doing it.

Speaker 3:

So, yeah, so I started a TikTok channel. It was the pandemic. I had caved and downloaded TikTok personally and I was like this would be a great platform to do science communication on, and so I started doing that and also did YouTube, also did Facebook, instagram, all the places, and have had just a lot of fun doing that. So I basically try to. Well, yeah, it's a bit up in the air right now. I just started a new job last week, so everything's a bit crazy for me right now, but I used to try and post weekly on YouTube. That doesn't really happen anymore, but I do try and post at least a couple times a month and just dive into random science and astronomy space topics, and also we talk a lot about the news, what's happening in the space world, because I think there's a lot of overlap there with people that are interested in both of those things. And yeah, we just hang out and we nerd out about space. So if you like doing that, come hang out with us.

Speaker 1:

I love it. So I have a couple big picture questions. As we kind of the last two that I've got, I'm leaving some out. Maybe some folks in the audience probably had those questions and there's some good commentary in the chat. What's something in the next like 10 to 20 years that you're the most excited about with space stuff? What's a couple of things or the thing that you're the most excited about?

Speaker 3:

The thing I'm most excited about, but it's really hard to say. That's a great question. It used to be easy because it used to be JDWST.

Speaker 1:

Will it launch? Will it launch?

Speaker 3:

But I'm still really excited about JDWST. I think we've only really seen the beginning of the science it's going to do, especially on the exoplanet side of the house. I think we still got a lot of more interesting trappist results coming up. I will be very keen to see. But I think, hmm, I'm most excited about in the next couple of years. I'm excited about a lot of things that are launching but they're not going to arrive at their destinations. I'm really excited about Europa Clipper.

Speaker 1:

The Europa Clipper is so cool.

Speaker 3:

Yes, I'm really excited about JUST that ESA just launched. This isn't going to arrive to Jupiter for several years. I'm really excited about Dragonfly, the octocopter that is going to the Moon, titan, where they have lakes of methane and like an atmosphere and it's just going to be so cool.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, when is Dragonfly going to get to Titan? Oh my gosh Like is that, eight years from now, is it still?

Speaker 3:

No, it's the ways away. It's not going to launch until 2026, so sometimes in 2030. We've got a while, that's what. I'm saying you know it's not going to be any time soon, but the launch is sometime in the next few years, so you know. And then it's like two years we have to live with the orbital dynamics and it's like a year and a half two year drive to get to Saturn something like that. Oh no, it's longer than that.

Speaker 1:

Oh my God, it's so far away.

Speaker 3:

It's like six or seven years, I think.

Speaker 1:

I'd have to work to double check.

Speaker 3:

I know Space is big. Space is, so I'm trying not to swear. It's very big.

Speaker 1:

We'll bleep you out in the recordings. All right, thanks, but that Octocopter, the dragonfly, keeps being mentioned by folks for you Like you, and what the wild thing is is when I started the Science Podcast, that was the first story that I did, which is wild, and I can't. I hope I'm alive and well when that thing does its business on Titan and we see some spooky Titan alien creature, you know, just glomping around in lakes of methane. I hope the most for so.

Speaker 3:

That would be amazing.

Speaker 1:

So the flip side of that, is there something? Because you study space and space is big, is there anything that you're concerned about, either from space or from here at home?

Speaker 3:

That's a good question, I think you know I don't think it's worth being concerned about. You know, threats from space. There are certainly things from space that could be very, potentially catastrophic, but their odds are very, very low. I think probably the most reasonable maybe reasonable is the wrong word high likelihood thing to worry about is, you know, an asteroid strike obviously cyanarylodiasaurus, but we do actually monitor for that and we've gotten, you know, not probably exactly as much as we need, but we've gotten really really far in our capabilities of monitoring near Earth asteroids and there are none on the docket that we think are going to be hazardous, you know, for many, many years. So I think that's not something worth worrying about but is probably the most likely thing that could cause a lot of damage from space.

Speaker 3:

I guess you know, in the space arena from here on Earth, things that I worry about or that I am concerned about is just, you know, the same kind of concerns. I think every industry has sustainability. You know how does the space industry fit within a context of climate change? How do we make sure that the space industry is equitable? You know how space law is just a huge field that is so unknown and untested, and how are we going to deal with, you know, spacex landing on Mars, if that, you know, comes to be like what is the international implications going to be of all this stuff, and that's not at all my area of expertise.

Speaker 3:

I'm very curious to see what people who are smarter than me about that are going to come up with and how we're going to deal with that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, if a private company gets to you know an asteroid first, do they then own the asteroid? Like that's something that I think about sometimes.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, there's a lot of raw materials there, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Or a private company gets to Mars first, do they own? Mars or is there a law against owning planets?

Speaker 3:

I think right now I can't remember off the top of my head, I think right now it is there is kind of an international law against basically claiming territory. You know, like on the moon was what was written for, but I think we're probably also put in Mars. But you know, there's no like. What's the enforcement mechanism for that right? It's just an international thing that some countries agreed to, but not everybody, as far as I know. So yeah, I don't know. We're getting very far afield from my expertise here.

Speaker 1:

I was just. Yeah, I like speculating, yeah, you know.

Speaker 3:

Yes, I do too. I just don't want anyone to take what I'm saying as gospel here.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, Some very, very rich person says I own Mars. What are you going to do? Send a space cop after me.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, exactly Like. I mean, we can say all the things we want, but how are we going to make it happen? I don't know. It's a tricky problem, for sure.

Speaker 1:

I love it. Doc, would you mind taking a couple of questions from the audience before we wrap up tonight? Sure, okay, folks. Chris, I don't know if you can speak. You're dealing with Toddler Time Bunsen right now.

Speaker 2:

He's not crying this second as long as I break my nails through his hair.

Speaker 1:

Did you want to read the ground rules for people that?

Speaker 2:

might want to yes.

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Speaker 2:

We are a PG rated community space, so please be respectful with your questions and, as Dr Noor already said, that we were kind of getting out of the realm of the expertise. So if we could stay within that realm of expertise that would be great. And we do check your profile to see what you are all about and if you have a question or we don't recognize you, we might DM you or ask you to DM us With your question, because we have had people come up who had nefarious agendas.

Speaker 1:

Okay, perfect Tracy. I see you're up, go ahead. Hi guys. Hello.

Speaker 4:

So my question was just if you were ever in Young Astronauts as a kid and if you have a pet story for us.

Speaker 3:

That's a great question. I was not in Young Astronauts as a kid. I actually don't know what that is.

Speaker 4:

It was just for like, if you were like good at math and science at elementary school, we got to like do projects and we had like a little competition at the end of the year just to who got like the most products done and that type of thing.

Speaker 3:

So that sounds like something I would have really liked. I was on the math team. I was, you know, a huge nerd as a kid, but I did not do that particular program and a pet story. So I have two pet rabbits and they are wonderful and cute, but they're not the best storytellers because they're very lazy. So I don't know if I have an excellent story off the top of my head, but they're super cute, so that's their super power.

Speaker 1:

What are their names?

Speaker 3:

Their names are Pippin and Feely.

Speaker 1:

Oh, you know what we talked about your rabbits on the Science. Podcast we did yes. Yes characters from Lord of the Rings. Thanks for your question, tracy. We also have a question for the doc. We have a comment from Facebook. Madison Redford says it's so cool A woman will be on the moon. And is that from? Like the Totally agree Doc? Is that from the Artemis 3? Because there is a woman on Artemis 2. Like.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so they haven't announced who it's going to be yet. We do not know the astronauts. They just announced Artemis 2 a month or two ago and, yeah, those are the people not landing on the moon. Obviously it's a very exciting mission and very cool to be going around the moon, but, yeah, we don't know exactly who it's going to be. But they have committed to the fact that there is going to be a woman landing on the moon in that mission.

Speaker 1:

Perfect, and I'm not seeing any other questions in the chat. Chris, do you have any questions?

Speaker 2:

I don't.

Speaker 1:

Okay, Well, we'll give everybody another few seconds here and then I've got one more and we'll wrap it up. Sometimes people have to work up the courage.

Speaker 3:

I'm very scary.

Speaker 2:

No, you just answered my questions. Like I was wondering about, like the YouTube channel and what inspired you there, and you'd already talked about it, and then you shared your pet story. So that was another one of my questions what's your favorite sci-fi author?

Speaker 3:

Oh, that's an excellent question, okay, oh, this is a hard one. So I actually, like I said, I love science fiction and also fantasy, if you couldn't tell by the fact that I like the dragons with my spaceships, but I actually also write them, although not anything that you could really read, but so I've always had a lifelong love of that. So it's hard to pick a favorite. I would say maybe my favorite series is the Culture Series by Ian Banks, and I would also put the author, cj Cherry, right up there on my favorite science fiction, which I don't. I feel like she does not get the recognition that she deserves because she's amazing, amazing author.

Speaker 1:

That's Cherry with an H, I believe.

Speaker 3:

It is. Yes, there's an H at the end. I don't know why, but I'm pretty sure it's still just pronounced Cherry.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Speaker 3:

I could be wrong. I'm horrible at pronouncing things. Curse of someone that reads too much, probably.

Speaker 1:

Oh, my goodness, chris, it's just like me I read words before I could pronounce them and it's messed up how I talk. Yep All the time.

Speaker 3:

So I'm on the other day on one of my TikTok videos, thought that I was like making a joke and like purposely mispronouncing the name of a constellation and like I usually will look it up if I'm unsure. But I was so confident about this one and it was the constellation I believe I said Akula. No, I said Akula, and then that's not how you pronounce it and I was. I was shocked it's Akula or something weird like that.

Speaker 1:

I don't know it was. It was very strange.

Speaker 3:

I still don't even know how to pronounce it. Anyway, that was a. That's right, but it's true, I can't pronounce things.

Speaker 1:

Good luck trying to pronounce Beetlejuice. If you're trying to say that phonetically, betelgueusey.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1:

That one's a weird one, they're all kind of they're all kind of bizarre. Yeah, I read the asterix and obelix cartoon books. I don't know if you've heard of the asterix and obelix books. Oh, I don't think so. Oh, they're from. They're from France, and then they're translated in English. It's about to. It's about two Gaulish barbarians fighting the Roman Empire.

Speaker 1:

Anyways they're always yeah, I know they're excellent. They're always. There's always a couple scenes with Julius Caesar, but I never, nobody in my life ever, pronounced Caesar ever. So in my head I pronounced it Casir. And I got caught when we went out to a fancy restaurant restaurant with my family and they're like, well, what kind of salad dressing do you want? And I said, well, what do you have? And they pointed the list and I said, oh, I'll have some casir salad dressing. And I was like, I was like 16 and everybody laughed at me.

Speaker 3:

So oh boy, yeah, I've been there. For me it was tortilla. I don't, I knew the word tortilla, I just did not associate the word I knew with the word I read.

Speaker 1:

I love it. So two, two last kind of closing up questions Can. Can you tell us about your new job, or is that very hush, hush secret?

Speaker 3:

I mean, it's not secret, but it's not really related to to space or astronomy. Okay, I'm just doing science, so that's fun, okay.

Speaker 1:

And the other one, since you're, since you do like science fiction and fantasy, star Wars or Star Trek.

Speaker 3:

You know I've always been a Star Wars girl. I have actually never really seen. I've seen some of the new movies with like Chris Pine, but I've never seen like any of the the you know peak Star Trek historical with with Shatner and Nimoy and all that yeah. So I guess I'm a Star Wars person.

Speaker 3:

Gotcha, I just I think it was just my parents were not Trekkies, so we watched Star Wars when I was a kid and then I just never was really exposed to Star Trek. I think I was a bit, you know, past its prime.

Speaker 1:

There you go. Well, chris is a Trekkie and I'm sort of a Star Wars person. I liked like the space battles, not the, not like the space wizard battles. But when I saw the Mandalorian I was all in. I don't know something about that show spoke to me and now our whole family cosplays as the Mandalorian. I have a replica D'Njarin costume, like it's a whole. It's a whole thing.

Speaker 3:

I've actually I've not seen the Mandalorian.

Speaker 1:

I've heard good things about it but you know, you know how it is with the streaming services.

Speaker 3:

I just I don't happen to have Disney plus right now.

Speaker 1:

I had it in the past.

Speaker 3:

I'll probably have it again in the future.

Speaker 1:

But yeah, yeah, okay, well, we'll wrap. We'll wrap stuff up. Thank you so much for being our guests tonight. Where can people find you on social media?

Speaker 3:

Awesome, yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was a lot of fun. You can find me on social media under the name Norris God to the galaxy or some variant of it, but if you search that in any social media site, you should be able to find me.

Speaker 1:

Doc, thanks for being our guests tonight, really appreciate it Awesome.

Speaker 3:

Thank you so much. Have a good night.

Speaker 1:

You betcha.