Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Exploring both interstellar and interpersonal space-time continuums. The Last Show with David Cooper. Far, far away in a planetary system that has astounded astronomers exists some planets that are breaking our brains. We're going to discuss them here with astrophysicist and professor Jesse Rogerson from York University. Jesse, I love doing science news with you. Thank you for being on the show.
You're welcome. I love doing it, too. You ready to talk some science?
I am, and I love space. That's my jam. I always loved planets. I remember when planets were first discovered outside of our solar system when I was a kid and it blew my mind.
Chapter 2: What solar system has astronomers puzzled?
Now we've mapped out tens of thousands of them and they are weird, some of them.
Yeah, 1995, that was the first official planet found around a sun-like star, 51 Peg B. 1995, it's a brand new field. And since I think the number is somewhere in the sixth, I don't know if it's 10,000 yet. I think it's 6,000 planets. And up until 1995, all we had was our solar system to go by. And there was this hypothesis, which is really a theory now, of how the solar system formed.
It formed from a big gas cloud. Collapsed down into a star, flattened out into a disk around it, and the planets formed inside. And this theory on how our solar system formed explains some really important things about our solar system, like why our solar system is flat, for example. You know, it's great. I literally just taught this in my astronomy class.
Cool. I remember being nine years old. And I mean, we did have one thing going for us before 1995, because at that time, Pluto was still a planet. So there is some loss, but what the gain was, is this discovery. Anyway, let's talk about this solar system, planetary system, what, some hundred plus light years away from Earth. So kind of our neighbor in galactic scales or universal scales.
These planets are orbiting a red dwarf star named LHS 1903. Tell me about what makes them so weird and why astronomers are so puzzled by this system.
So when you look at this system, so red dwarf stars are the most common type of star in the universe. So you expect to find planets around them. And there's both rocky and gassy planets around this star, just like we have rocky and gassy planets. But the order is confusing. Here in our solar system, we have the inner rocky ones. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars are rocky planets.
They're close to the sun. And then you have the gassy ones, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and they're far from the sun. And that is easily explained through like a temperature gradient where close to the star, it's hotter. And things like gases and volatiles like ices don't really like being near hot things. And so planets that are made of gases form farther away from the hot thing.
That's a pretty standard approach to planetary formation.
Because if Uranus existed close to the sun, we would have a hot gas problem. Sorry, that's a different interview that I do on the show. Okay, so the kind of like structure or composition of planets kind of makes sense. Rocky ones close, big gas ones far away. This is kind of our picture of what star systems should look like with planets.
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Chapter 3: What theories explain the formation of our solar system?
Or is your answer, I'm not sure.
No, that's a good question. I would say probably not. I didn't investigate that, but the way we would know is looking at the orbit. So when planets form naturally around a star, they're going to be usually in pretty circularized orbits. But a planet that's captured would not be part of the flat plane and would not be in a nice circular orbit.
It would be like in a random elliptical orbit on some random orientation. And if that's the case, then it could be captured. But they made no mention of that in the paper. I imagine it's... obliquity it's like inclination to the plane is probably pretty standard so it's it's probably from the they probably check that i would bet
All right, well, since we're doing general science news, let's completely change courses outside of this star system and look at a habit that can ease people's depression and anxiety systems. Symptoms, not systems. Tell me about it.
This was from the British Journal of Sports Medicine, where they were looking into people affected by depression and anxiety. and how best to treat that through exercise-based therapies. So this is a meta study. In fact, it's actually a meta meta study.
So if you've ever, in science, a thing called a meta study is where a group of researchers go into the literature and find all of the studies that have already been done by other researchers and like take a look at all of those results and look for patterns. very important things to be doing metastudies.
This study was a metastudy of metastudies about depression and anxiety, if you're following me.
So it's a study of studies of studies. And what did they learn? Like, what can I do to ease my symptoms of depression and anxiety? Side note, I have depression and anxiety. So
Both of them.
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