Sarah Rugheimer: Galactic Discovery We're 'On Cloud 9' With - January 9, 2026
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How to break a record in just seven nights. All you have to do is become an asteroid. We are here with Sarah Rugheimer, an astrophysicist at the University of Edinburgh. Check out her Audible original, Searching for Extraterrestrial Life on audible.com. Sarah, I recently bought your Audible original. I just haven't listened to it yet. Welcome to the show also.
Amazing. Excited to hear what you think of it then.
I will let you know. Now I'm on the hook to listen to it. I just had too many credits and they're like, use some of these credits. Okay, this is a very compelling part of the interview. Let's talk about this new asteroid that Vera Rubin Observatory saw that is enormous, that is spinning really fast, that is a wild object out there. Tell me about it.
Yeah, so I think what's cool about this is you have to think about what are asteroids in general. So asteroids are sort of this leftover mess from the early solar system from when our planets were forming. And that means they're often just kind of clumps of little pebbles. And I mean, kind of think of dust bunnies in your house under your couch, but with also bigger, slightly like bigger pebbly sort of objects and they kind of just hold together. And so what's weird about this is it can't be that. So it's spinning quite fast. And that means if it was just this sort of dust bunny collection of pebbles, it would rip apart. And so it has to be rock.
It's like a bunch of kids on those, what do you call those, rotating things in the playground. If you get it spinning fast enough, all the kids are going to fly off it.
Fly off, exactly.
It's true for asteroids too. If they spin too fast, they should break up.
Indeed, indeed. So this is the weird thing about this. And it's not like it's so atypical. We've seen other asteroids like this, asteroids that spin even faster. It's just a cool object. And Vera Rubin is discovering this first in some of its first observations. And so... Yeah, I think it's pretty cool. It's a fast spinning asteroid. It's quite large. You know, it's 1,640 feet. So it's kind of, you know, a bigger, bigger than a skyscraper. You know, it's quite big asteroid, but it's solid rock rather than a collection of smaller grains of pebbles and stuff.
Big enough that if it were to slam into us, we'd have to send Bruce Willis out there to put a nuke on it and explode it. This is a big object.
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, indeed. And we would want to do that far enough away such that we wouldn't get just all the pieces onto us.
Which would then be spinning very fast. Let's go to another odd object, this time not in our solar system, but in fact, a galaxy far, far away.
What record-breaking asteroid did the Vera C. Rubin Observatory discover?
I don't even like Star Wars. Don't know why I said that. When there's enough stuff in a galaxy, gas, it kind of collapses into stars. The gravity of the mass collapses into stars. So it's very odd to have like a big cloud of gas at a galactic size with no stars. Yeah. But a new one has been discovered and it raises questions about like dark matter, the early universe. It is a massive object emitting no light.
Yeah, so this one I think is really interesting because it's this detection of neutral hydrogen in this cloud that they're calling Cloud 9. And it's about 16 million light years away, which sounds far, but it's actually not that far. It's pretty close to us in the grand scheme of things. But it has 1 million solar masses. So that means it could contain, say, like 1 million stars. Or more, right? Because a lot of stars are smaller than the Sun. However, they are seeing a maximum of maybe a thousand stars in this. And you just wouldn't expect something this large that has this much mass to not have stars in it. So it's this cloud of neutral hydrogen. just kind of never formed a galaxy. And that's really interesting because it means that we're kind of looking at something that probably is what the very early embryonic stage of our galaxy was before anything really developed in the very early universe.
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