Dr. Jillian Scudder
Appearances
Something You Should Know
Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
I think it comes from the fact that I teach a lot of classes to students who don't have a lot of space background and people who don't have a big background in the field wind up accidentally asking truly fascinating questions. And they're things that I would never have thought of. And then when I go try and figure out what the answers are, sometimes it's really complicated.
Something You Should Know
Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
And so I wind up getting into all those weird stuff that otherwise I would have no excuse to go look into. And then I start going, well, that's cool. I didn't know that. And there's lots of it because space is weird.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
Well, you shouldn't go smell it. It will kill you. So in the very center of the Milky Way, there is a big gas cloud that we've been observing for a long time. And it's one of these places that people have been searching for fancy molecules. And one of the molecules that was found in that cloud of gas is responsible on Earth in other contexts for the smell of rum and the flavor of raspberries.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
Also in that cloud is a whole bunch of stuff that is terrible for you. So there's methanol, there's a form of cyanide, there's a whole bunch of other really nasty things. So do not go smell it.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
Proportionally, it is flatter than a credit card. So a credit card is a relatively small object, but it is much wider than it is thick. And so if you were to take a credit card and scale it up to the size of the Milky Way, then the Milky Way would be thinner than that credit card is. So it's really to do with how thick it is versus how wide it is, more than the actual physical size.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
Because yes, you are not thinner than a credit card. Neither am I. And the Milky Way is very large. But the proportions of it... From center to edge versus from top to bottom, the Milky Way is very, very thin.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
It's running out of gas. So the light in the universe comes from stars. Stars form out of clouds of gas. And a lot of the clouds of gas that existed in the earlier universe have already been turned into stars. And so there's less now to work with. And so the stars that remain, we have a lot of stars that are left over, but a lot of those stars are relatively faint and dim now.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
The ones that last a long time are really, really dark red and don't produce a lot of light. The ones that form quickly are very bright. They also die quickly. So as we form... Stars, some fraction of them make bright stars and some fraction of them make these really, really dim stars that live forever. And those little dim stars basically lock up more and more gas as time goes on.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
And so the galaxy and the universe generally gets a little bit fainter over time.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
Well, we to the human eye are really only going to catch on to things that are happening in the Milky Way. All the stars that we see in the night sky are in our own galaxy. This is really comparing how have galaxies changed over time. And galaxies have gotten dimmer over time.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
But the human experience is looking at such a tiny fraction of this cosmic timescale that, yeah, to the human experience, no, it's not changing. But over the last two billion years, it's changed.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
Very likely it will continue, yes. The reasons for which everything is getting fainter will not change. Those are going to stay in place. And so, yeah, it should just get fainter and fainter as we go on into the future.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
This is true, but not as many as there were. So our Milky Way forms on average something like two to four solar masses. So stars, the equivalent mass of the sun every year. But two billion years ago, that might have been 10 times higher, five times higher. So there is still forming stars. It's just not as many.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
It's a very heavy averaging job is what that means. So in specific, the universe is very colorful. If you look at any particular part of the sky or the world around you, we have lots of things happening that are all sorts of different colors. You look at the images that come back from Hubble, and they come in all sorts of very vivid, beautiful colors.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
But if you average all of that together, you're combining red light and blue light and green light and yellow light and all of these other colors. And so the question was, if we average the light from nearby galaxies, is it blue-ish, red-ish, white-ish? And the answer came back that on average, it's just a little bit to the red side of white. So it's beige colored.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
I was surprisingly fascinated by learning about the volcanoes on the moon. I knew that there were volcanoes on the moon, but I didn't have a lot of information about that. And it took me a surprisingly long time to wrap my head around it. But it was really fun once I started to get a sense of what was happening. Partially just because I was learning about something that was such a dramatic event.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
Because the way the volcanoes worked on the moon... is that they exploded into space. So just the worst volcanic eruption you can imagine. That explains why there's little glass pellets all over the moon. Because back when the moon was volcanically active, it was just exploding rock into the void of space and raining down tiny glass pellets all over the place.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
It was super fun to learn about. Yeah.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
Most of it was happening, I think, about 1 to 2 billion years ago. But there was a long tail. So there's active research actually trying to figure out when volcanic activity on the moon stopped. And it may have been as recent as like 100 million years ago. But most of it was earlier.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
There are volcanoes in a surprisingly large number of places in the solar system. And almost none of them happen... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Something You Should Know
Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Something You Should Know
Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
Thank you very much. Thank you.
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
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Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
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Something You Should Know
Why Human Touch is So Important & Space Facts That Will Shock You - SYSK Choice
It is a theory. It's a very plausible theory because Neptune has a lot of methane in it. It's very high pressure. Methane has a lot of carbon in it. If you crush things that have lots of carbon in it, you might make diamonds and it might fall as rain.