lost in the fog of a cosmic storm floating on
whimsical wavelengths is the norm dancing through
the stars chasing spectrums of light Welcome
back to another episode of Whimsical Wavelengths.
Before I jump right in, it's time to do a little
bit of housekeeping. First off, happy Christmas,
merry holidays, and all the mixing and matching
of all the different holidays and solsticness
that is all going on. I've got my Christmas tree
already put up in my living room. My own two
monsters are... Counting down the days, using
my homemade advent calendar that I do every year.
I put little boxes and things together with different
kind of candy. It's a fun way to be able to count
down, and for kids, they get so incredibly excited.
It's a festive time of year, a time where we
come together. It's also the time of year where
we start reflecting on the year that has passed.
And here on Whimsical Wavelengths, it's been
a pretty damn good year. Into Season 2. And just
keep going. I think I'm putting together something
that is really useful and perhaps filling a niche
that this world needs a little bit more of. But
to get better, I need you guys. So hopefully
in this next year, you will put in a New Year's
resolution to reach out and, I don't know, give
me some feedback. Tell me what works, what doesn't
work, and all that other things. Oh, also, the
very first episode of the year will actually
be an encore edition. I need that extra two -week
period to get everything ready and make sure
that I'm not always behind the eight ball, that
I'm putting my best foot forward and producing
content that at least I want to hear. And hopefully
you do as well. So that very first one, I believe
it'll be the first Monday in January, there will
be an encore edition, and then we'll move in
with my past PhD supervisor, Dr. Glenn Williams
-Jones, as part of a two -part episode, although
two different guests, just the location of the
science generally stays the same. I'm totally
looking forward to it, and I hope you guys are
as well. So... Why am I doing this? Well, yeah,
because I'm a little bit behind. Why am I behind?
Because of that trip to Saudi Arabia earlier
in October. Fantastic trip. So glad I went there.
There's certain things, particularly outside
of the major city, that were just culturally
hard for me to understand. You can always ask
me over beers at one time if you ever catch me
at a pub. Ask me about it, but I don't think
it's really worthwhile. Going on to... In the
podcast. Why? It's not science -related, and
it's for my day job. So, this is a solo episode.
I'm setting it up just for myself, because every
once in a while, I take a deviation. That is
more about history, instead of, like, cutting
-edge research with guests and the like. In season
one, I did Nikola Tesla, the Mediterranean Sea,
and the rise and fall of leaded gasoline. Here,
in Season 2, this is the first episode in this
kind of vein. You, the listener, what would be
fun for you? Tell me. Perhaps I'll find a way
to make an episode all about it. And more importantly,
give me some more feedback of whether these types
of episodes are good for you. They take me a
significantly more time and effort to produce
and do the research, because they're not really
within my wheelhouse, but I feel there's still
a lot there to be gained to have someone talk
about it and do the storytelling. So today we're
going to look at the planets. Why? Because there's
lots we can get into, from prehistoric times
to today. And the search for, quote -unquote,
Planet Nine. It'll be whimsical. It'll be fun.
Well, fun, at least for me, anyway. And it also
will chronicle science progress. How we learn
new tools and how those tools enter the scene
and change how we view the universe around us.
I could cut this whole idea to famous quotes
like... If I've seen further, it is by Standing
on the Shoulders of Giants by Sir Isaac Newton.
Or if I wanted more historical, there are many
famous quotes. But I'll stick with, you have
to know the past to understand the present, which
is attributed to Carl Sagan. This idea on analysis
is absolutely required right now. We have to
know the past to understand the present. So much
is being covered up, or forgotten, or perhaps
just turned a blind eye to. And the scary bit
of maybe sounding political, vaccination is something
that instantaneously comes to mind for me. The
hard lessons of the past are being completely
ignored. There is no clear data set suggesting
that the current vaccine schedule in, say, Canada,
and I could choose a different country, is causing
more harms than the risks of getting the pathogens
if not vaccinated. Yeah, scientific speak, but
it should end the discussion for population scale
ideas. But I digress. That deviation is to show
understanding the past scientific endeavors is
useful for providing context to the present and
ultimately the future. So the planets, because
no matter the discipline, the process is similar.
To start, to start. Well, how about which planets
have we known about since, like, the antiquity?
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. For
each of these planets, the earliest records are
from the Babylonian astronomers of about 1000
BCE. Or, you know, 3000 -ish years ago. They
made meticulous observations of the night sky
by eye. They are the first, as far as we know
of anyway, to come up with a mathematical model
of the sky. Their work also set up modern -day
astrology, zodiac signs. If you believe or use
them, then you are in a way taking part in a
spiritual tradition that dates back almost 3
,000 years ago. That, of course, doesn't make
them, well... the modern version anyway, any
more correct or useful. For instance, I'm a Virgo,
so let's do a quick Google search and see what
it says about me and podcasting. Well, according
to the Times of India, Virgo is going to have
a research -heavy podcast with well -structured
episodes, fact -checks everything, uses timestamps,
which I don't, and has a highly dedicated but
small audience that swears by every word. I'm
not sure that part's true either. Reader's Digest
suggests Virgos will create true crime podcasts.
Generally, I detest true crime. There are caveats
to this, but in reality, when you get down to
it, it bothers me because it warps our perception.
Statistics and reality often get left behind
in true crime. Some kind of magazine or website
is another idea. Bustle is the name. It doesn't
even have Virgo listed and directly contradicts
the times of India with respect to one of the
other zodiac signs, Aries, as they were rated
among the least likely to create a long -running
podcast and in here, in Bustle, the most likely.
Yeah. The last thing I'll mention. With this
search and the whole zodiac signs is one result
that came up that suggested those... with the
sign of Aquarius or Virgo, are most likely to
start a cult. Yeah, it's a mixed bag out there.
Nothing empirical or anything. I can't assign
a number to it. But, yeah, they're not scientific.
Let's just go with that. So, back on track. Away
from the zodiac signs. It's important to state
that the planets in ancient times, back to 1000
BCE, They were thought of as moving or wandering
stars. They weren't thought of as worlds. The
Babylonians were making observations of these
wandering stars and creating mathematical models
around 300 BCE to 400 BCE to predict when they
would reappear in the sky. The word planet comes
from the Greeks, actually. I'm not going to butcher
this pronunciation, but planetai, loosely meaning
wandering light. and not a world or what we have
as a modern understanding of what a planet is.
So a very quick rundown on the Greek understanding
of the planets. Mercury, the Greeks originally
thought it was Apollo when seen at sunrise and
Hermes at sunset, two separate objects, but eventually
they did get around to recognizing it as one
body or light. Venus, also thought was two different
objects based on morning and evening. Mars, probably
because its red color was always just seen as
one object instead of two, and Jupiter and Saturn
had the same stories as Mars, where they were
thought of as a single object. Before 1540, the
conventional understanding of the universe had
Earth at its center and everything revolved around
the Earth. Complex mathematical formulas could
predict the positions of the Sun, the Moon, and
the wandering stars. i .e. the planets. The mathematics
were developed by Plutomi, a mathematician born
in Alexandria, Egypt, which was a Roman province
during his lifetime. See, I almost, almost managed
to escape the episode without mentioning the
Roman Empire. Well, this mathematical model lasted
for nearly 1 ,500 years. Then came Nicolaus Copernicus,
the heliocentric model. putting the sun at the
center. This new model simplified everything,
but it was not accepted everywhere at first.
In fact, it wasn't accepted basically anywhere,
mostly for religious reasons, and there was no
clear observational evidence for the heliocentric
model to begin with, and it really delayed its
acceptance. But all that began to change with
the invention of the telescope in 1608 in the
Netherlands. Galileo took that invention, improved
on the optics, and turned it towards the night
sky. Quickly, observations of the moon's mountains
and the valleys and Venus showed a series of
phases like the moon proving Venus orbits the
sun. And the discovery of the moons around Jupiter
showed that not everything revolved around Earth.
Unfortunately for Galileo, the Catholic Church
thought this idea was dangerous. I feel even
today I'm going into dangerous territory here,
which is kind of wild when you think about it.
Science is about observations and explaining
those observations with continual tests and data.
Observational evidence was showing that the Earth
was not the center of the universe. The issue
was the theological understanding that the universe
placed the Earth at its center. The Bible had
a number of passages which were interpreted to
mean the sun moved around the earth and the earth
was stationary. So a heliocentric model of the
universe contradicted faith and therefore represented
heresy. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Okay, well, we're not there yet. The Spanish
Inquisition doesn't exist. And if you only spent
10 minutes or so searching, that's the story
that would be told. However, it's a bit more
complicated than that. Copernicus' heliocentric
model was originally treated like a mathematical
argument or assumption, if you will. It didn't
have any evidence behind it. It was a clever
solution, as it was conceptually simpler. But
the Earth didn't move, because that would be
totally crazy. Well, with the new observations
by Galileo, the scientific world quickly divided
itself into three different boxes. There were
the philosophers, or the... Aristotelians, who
were adamant that the heavens were perfect and
unchanging. The moon was made of ether, not an
earthly matter. It is surprising how often this
idea still actually makes its appearances today
on the fringes of, like, Flat Earth and other
weird Facebook groups that I have been a part
of. This group of Aristotelians would go as far
as suggesting telescopes had flawed lenses or
that Galileo was misinterpreting the optical
illusions. Obstinate and find ways to throw mud
towards what did not align with the world view.
Oh, sounds so familiar. There was the church's
choice to explain the data and seemed to be where
the majority of the astronomers at the time were.
Tachronics, named after the person who developed
the paradigm. They claimed the data could be
explained if the Sun and the Moon orbited Earth
and the other planets orbited the Sun. Very important
to note, this model at the time could explain
the observations. It had the added benefit of
being closer to the previous understanding. The
Earth didn't move. Scripture interpretation stayed
intact. Then there was the Copernicus heliocentric
model. Simpler, but if the Earth was moving,
parallax should be able to be measured. Well,
what is parallax, you ask? Well, let's describe
how you can experience it, how, if safe to do
so, you can do it right now, and perform this
very simple experiment, i .e., if you're driving
a car, please don't do it. Hold your thumb out
at arm's length. Close one eye and align your
thumb with a distance object. like a clock or
a picture or a tree if you're outside without
moving your thumb close that eye and open the
other your thumb will appear to have jumped to
a new position against that distant background
so if the earth moved stars should shift in the
sky yearly now no parallax was measured until
eighteen thirty eight using bessel's measurement
of sixty one sign which is a star It was the
first successful measurement to show parallax
from Earth. I know that this is a science podcast,
but typically I try to stay away from overloading
with numbers. However, it's kind of here important
to understand the parallax problem here and show
why early astronomers just couldn't possibly
detect it and why the heliocentric model took
so long to really be fully adopted. So let's
start with the best case scenario, the closest
star to Earth. What is Proxima? Centauri, which
is about 4 .24 light years away, or 268 ,000
astronomical units. If we use the Earth's orbit
instead of our two eyes, and astronomical units
is just the distance, the average distance of
the Earth to the Sun. It's just one of those
conventions. Gives us something a little easier
to work with instead of like millions and millions
and millions of kilometers and miles. So if we
use the Earth's orbit instead of our two eyes,
i .e. the solstices or the equinoxes, and view
the same star, the distance between the baseline
is two astronomical units. Placing it into the
equation works out to approximately one astronomical
unit over 260... 8 000 astronomical units or
3 .7 times 10 to the negative 6 radians or 0
.76 arc seconds okay those are numbers all right
now let's get back to something we can actually
relate those numbers to this is the equivalent
to being able to see the width of a coin five
kilometers away yeah i i don't think we're going
to see a person if we just use our eyes at five
kilometers away but the width of a coin that
would be impressive and it comes down to instrumentation
and precision at best pre -1600 naked eye measurements
had errors of one to ten arc minutes or 60 to
600 times larger than that width of coin that
we were just talking about and early telescopes
had instrument accuracy of maybe 10 to 20 arc
seconds at best. So while that was still a huge
improvement from those naked eye measurements,
it was still a bit more than an order of magnitude
too imprecise to measure the parallax to the
closest star to Earth. So back to the very first
time parallax was measured in 1838, 61 Cygni
is 10 .4 light years away, so quite close. And
the measurement was 0 .314 arcseconds. This is
a theme that comes up again and again in cosmology.
Our ability to measure becomes more precise as
we open up new avenues of investigation, like
Hubble's discovery of galaxies and gravitational
lensing. Don't forget, gravitational lensing
was covered in Season 1 as a two -parter. Freaking
awesome. You should go back and listen to it
if you have not. To bring this part of the episode
to a close, galileo would continue to make observations
and become more convinced that the heliocentric
model was correct eventually he made his opinions
unequivocal and he was found guilty of vehement
suspicion of heresy and spent the rest of his
days under house arrest Of course, the story
doesn't stop there or stop here with Galileo
under house arrest. Another astronomer across
Europe was figuring out that the planets don't
actually move in perfect circles at all. Jonas
Kepler. One of science's greatest mystics. An
oxymoron, perhaps, but it's an apt one. Overlapping
with Galileo, Jonas Kepler published the first
two laws of planetary motion in 1609. and the
third in 1619. Before getting into the laws themselves,
why Kepler was able to publish clear arguments
dismantling geocentrism and Galileo was walked
away? Well, it comes down to a couple of things.
Location and people. First, I've said it before
on this podcast and I'll say it many, many times.
People are weird. It's just the truth. Here I
am on a mic talking about science to people I
have never met. Another common theme in these
solo episodes, people, are weird. Galileo was
argumentative and published a lot of things that
were combative, his ideas, and he brought them
straight to the masses. So he would just publish
for the average person. Kepler was a theologian
first, trained as one. I mean, he viewed geometry
as divine. If he could describe the world through
geometry, in other words, math, then it was proof
of God's divine work. It's a very different framing
than Galileo. Kepler also published in mathematical
arguments, not prose for the average person.
So the average theologian would never know what
work he published or talked about or wrote about.
And he would never know that it essentially argues
for the fall of geocentrism, i .e. that the earth
moves. and his work refining heliocentrism. Sometimes
it isn't the message, but the messenger. True
story. By focusing on the math and the observations,
Kepler determined the planets did not move in
circles, but ellipses. And so here are his three
general planet laws of planetary motion. The
first, an orbit of a planet is an ellipse with
the sun at one of two foci. Two. A line segment
joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal
areas during equal intervals of time. 3. The
square of the planet's orbital period is proportional
to the cube of the length of its semi -major
axis of its orbit. I don't want to get too bogged
down here in the details, as I still need to
get through Newton before I can get back to the
planets themselves. But it's important to mention
this. These laws were absolutely fundamental
and an important point along our journey here
today. Jonas Kepler's attention to detail and
academic honesty to not force things to fit ideas
that were handed to him led to those three observations
that would later be called scientific laws. All
the while believing that he was indeed doing
God's work by chronicling the divine through
geometry. It really takes all types, sometimes
even the mystics, to move science forward. So
if Kepler described what the planets did, Newton
explained why they did it. The guy Sir Isaac
Newton was mysterious and a bit of a rebel with
respect to the academic thought. His relationship
with theology was... complicated, much only coming
out since 1972, actually, after a bunch of his
personal notebooks were made available for public
investigation. Here we'll gloss over the academic
insults, insecurities, alchemy, the great work
he did with the British Mint, and even calculus.
Although calculus is there, hidden in the background,
for the rest of this episode. It is his seminal
work, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,
published in 1687 that we cannot ignore. It was
here that Newton unified physics, brought about
classical mechanics, and explained gravity. It
provided the why to the orbits of the planets.
We now had the ability to predict the movement
of all planets and many other phenomena. Okay,
up to this point, the world was still only aware
of the six inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth,
Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. We had the how and
the why. We also had telescopes, which needed
better manufacturing and better understanding
of the optics to make them more powerful. The
next planet in the solar system was waiting to
be observed. Funny thing is that the next planet
had previously been observed before. What is
known today as Uranus had been seen and documented
many, many times before. The earliest possible
is way, way back in 128 BCE by Greek astronomer,
geographer, and mathematician Hipparchus. Uranus
technically can be seen without a telescope,
but it requires really dark skies, which is definitely
a problem today. The other issue with potentially
identifying it as a planet by the eye is that
it moves so slowly. It makes a full orbit every
84 Earth years. So it would take very careful
observations over many, many years to identify
it as a planet or wandering heavenly light. Dim,
and it didn't wander very much. In 1781, British
amateur telescope builder, astronomer, composer,
titles, so many titles, noticed something in
the sky. It looked like a disk and not a star.
William Herschel. The long and the short of it
is that William Herschel thought he had found
a comet. It took data from others to convince
him otherwise. It was the first recognized planet
since antiquity. Well, detailed observations
of Uranus continued to be made across the world,
and in 1821, 40 years later, astronomical tables
for the orbit of Uranus were published. It provided
predictions based on Newton's equations of gravity.
there were inconsistencies between the calculations
and the observations. This really became evident
as Uranus nearly completed a full orbit from
the start of observations in 1847. There were
three general hypotheses to explain these discrepancies.
Influence of the Sun's gravity may be different
than Newton's description at a distance. The
result of observational error or three, another
celestial body out there. is gravitationally
tugging on Uranus. Now, whenever there's a defined
problem, there's a race to be the first to figure
it out. Harkening back a few episodes to the
geophysical inversions, this is an ill -posed
problem. It wasn't a race like that of Oppenheimer
trying to get an atomic bomb, or anything like
that. It was only prestige on the line. And it
ended up in controversy. Again, we come back
to this idea that people... are people, and they
do weird things. In fact, some have called it
a heist. Here's a question. Why are the pyramids
still in Egypt? Well, because the British couldn't
fit them into a museum. That joke will make sense
in a few more moments. Shout out to the show
or the podcast Stuff the British Stole. Sometimes
those episodes are truly amazing, like the one
on the Parthenon. Okay, back on track. The person
credited with the mathematically predicting the
orbit of Neptune, first via mathematical predictions,
is Urbain Levenier, a French astronomer and mathematician.
Sorry, terrible ability to do the accent and
pronounce it. Well, anyway, Monsieur Levenier
publicly announced his calculations to the French
Academy on the 31st of August in 1846, and then
sent the predictions to Johann Gallet, A German
astronomer at the Berlin Observatory. Once it
arrived, Johann promptly took that information
and used it. That night on September 23rd, 1846,
Neptune was officially discovered. So why the
joke about Britain at the top? Well, there are
usually multiple people looking at similar things
at similar times. There's also, at least at this
point in time, a lot of bragging rights on the
line. Nationalism. This should... not be a surprise.
I mean, look at the Cold War and the race to
the moon. So a British mathematician and astronomer,
John Couch Adams. This is where sources begin
to contradict somewhat, and the deeper you go,
the little bit more confused you get, and you
have to try to eventually take a side. And that
often happens where there's controversy. People
being people. Especially when there's so much
prestige on the line. Today it is, of course,
just a quirk of history, but it's still interesting
to explore these just for a moment. Picture a
young man. One who liked to calculate things
to many decimal places. Like that engineering
friend that knows pi to 17 decimal places. Not
terribly interested in actually writing up his
results and doing papers, but loves to solve
those complex mathematical problems. As part
of that, he is... calculations for Neptune were
ping -ponging around, or as the source I used,
like the word vacillating, on his solution. He
couldn't just, you know, give one number. It
wasn't fixed. He was tinkering. It didn't come
out with a whole lot of confidence and was, you
know, somewhat ignored by British academics because
of it. When Laverne's predictions and discovery
came out, there was a scramble to save. Curiously,
correspondence of Neptune and its discovery was
lost in Britain. In 1999, it was found in an
observation in Chile. Sometimes the truth is
just too hard to make up. Well, it seems based
on those documents anyway. The British case for
getting credit was built largely after the discovery
was made. It was absolutely true that John Couch
Adams did similar calculation and came up with
a similar answer. The timing and strength of
the conviction was not 100%. So you could argue
that the British, on a national level anyway,
stole the discovery. John Couch Adams did, and
probably rightly so, deserves credit for solving
the same problem. But as a host here on this
podcast, my bias is with Laverne taking the gold
medal if there was such a thing. Okay, one more
deviation on this. The American scientific establishment
tried to take part in the prestige game too.
Game of Thrones Astronomy Science Edition. The
nerdiest show ever conceived. Well, after the
discovery was known in the United States, a race
was on to claim some of the credit. And yes,
the Americans tried to jump in too. Once the
word that Neptune's discovery crossed the Atlantic,
the U .S. scientific establishment moved fast
to carve out a slice of the glory. Several American
astronomers claimed that they had independently
performed calculations that pointed to an unseen
planet. And a few scientific societies rushed
to publish statements asserting that the first
full orbital solution was produced on their side
of the ocean. It was mainly a patriotism and
opportunism mixed together kind of thing. Less
careful mathematics and more. We're also working
on that. A bit of scientific FOMO before the
phrase existed. In the end, the Americans' claims
didn't materially change the priority dispute,
but they do add a delightful extra wrinkle into
the international scramble for prestige. Okay,
so we had Neptune. The next planet to be discovered,
quote unquote, Pluto. In the early 20th century,
Percival Lowell, founder of the Lowell Observatory
in Arizona, became obsessed with the idea of
the ninth planet, which he called Planet X. Now
here's the part that often gets glossed over.
The entire premise of Planet X rested on bad
numbers. The irregularities Lowell saw in the...
Uranus and Neptune's motions weren't the gravitational
footprints of a hidden giant world out there
in the solar system just needing to be found.
They were mostly bookkeeping errors. For one,
the mass of Neptune in Laos' era was slightly
overestimated. That meant the predicted tug on
Neptune should exert on Uranus didn't match what
astronomers actually observed. The mismatch looked
mysterious, even persuasive, if you didn't know
that the mass was wrong. But Neptune's true mass
wouldn't be nailed down until Voyager 2 flew
past in 1989, long after Lowell's time, revealing
that the earlier value had been off enough to
throw off the calculations. Add to that the small
observational errors baked into 19th century
measurements, telescope pointing uncertainties,
timing inaccuracies, star catalog offsets. Remember,
astronomers were taking positions by hand. comparing
them to imperfect star charts, squeezing out
meaning of numbers that carried more noise than
they realized. When you stack a few tenths of
an arc second of measurement air year after year
and then plug those into perturbation equations,
you can magically discover forces that just aren't
there. Lowell couldn't have known that many of
the so -called orbital anomalies were just artifacts
in the data. but lowell believed those irregularities
hinted at another massive body further out he
spent the final decade of his life searching
for it he died without success but his observatory
kept the hunt alive enter clyde a young kansas
farm kid with a knack of building telescopes
hired by lowell observatory in nineteen twenty
nine his job was simple in description and brutal
in execution photograph the sky, then photograph
it again, and compare the plates under a blink
comparator. Basically, you line up the plates,
the photos, and compare them to something that's
blinking, and you're looking for anything through
thousands of stars, night after night, many,
many, many photos, staring into bright lights,
looking for anything, anything at all that moved.
Then, on February 18, 1930, Dombrov spotted it,
a tiny wandering dot against the star field.
After the well observatory confirmed the motion
and announced the discovery, the world embraced
Pluto. Headlines everywhere, school textbooks
were updated practically overnight. A schoolgirl
in Oxford even provided the name Pluto, continuing
the tradition of mythological underworld gods
for the outer planets. And conveniently, it started
with a P and then an L. Llewellyn's initials.
But before I move on a quick deviation, the idea
of a ninth planet never really died. Llewellyn's
planet X left kind of a gravitational ghost in
the scientific imagination, if you will. Once
Pluto was found, it didn't exactly solve the
orbital oddities Llewell thought it would. Pluto
was way too small. So the hypothesis lingered
in the background. And over the decades, every
time an astronomer saw something a little strange
in the outer solar system, the old dream of a
hidden massive world got revived. And then, of
course, the conspiracy world grabbed a hold of
it too. Nibiru. I think I'm pronouncing it right,
or Planet X, the supposed doomsday planet that
was always conveniently just about to swing into
the inner solar system any moment now. People
wrote books, made documentaries, and predicted
the end of the world more times than I can count,
and way more times than I have episodes. None
of it based in observation. All of it nonsense,
but it shows just how persistent the idea of
missing giant planet can be. Once it's in the
culture, it sticks. Scientifically, though, the
question is still interesting, but for very different
reasons. In the last decade, several teams have
noticed unusual clustering in the orbits of distant
Cooper Belt objects. These are objects that are
way out there, beyond kind of, Pluto's kind of
right on the edge of these objects. And some
astronomers argue that the alignment of those
orbits might, just might be explained by a large
unseen body further out. Maybe in the Oort cloud,
which is a region even beyond the Kuiper belt,
or approaching it. Something several times the
mass of the Earth on a long stretched out orbit.
It's not proven. There are competing explanations,
including observational biases, but the fact
remains that the... Planet 9, ideas very much
alive in serious academic scientific circles
today, just not as doom or mythology, but as
a legitimate open question in orbital dynamics.
Of course, Pluto's status didn't survive the
21st century. The better our telescopes got,
the more icy worlds were found in the Cooper
Belt, many of them similar in size to Pluto.
Some of them like Eris, even slightly larger.
At that point, astronomers had to choose. Either
suddenly we had dozens of planets, or we refined
the definition. In 2006, the International Astronomical
Union drew the line, and Pluto fell on the dwarf
planet side. No, not because it wasn't interesting,
not because it wasn't beloved, but because it
hadn't fully cleared out its orbit or neighborhood
of other debris. The rules changed, and Pluto,
poor Pluto. lost its gold medal status. And that's
where I'm ending this episode. From the nationalistic
chaos of Neptune's discovery to the quite careful
plate blinking that earned Pluto its brief time
among the planets and finally its demotion. A
reminder that science isn't just equations. It's
also people, pride, timing, and sometimes the
willingness to say we were wrong. Let's classify
this properly. So once again, Happy holidays,
Merry Christmas, Happy Solstice, and all the
others that are out there. I'm so looking forward
to the new year right here on Whimsical Wavelengths,
and I really hope that you're going to join me.
Yes, today's episode wasn't the star of Bethlehem,
but we were looking at the wandering stars, the
planets. Still kind of Christmas themed. I wasn't
going to try too hard, don't worry. So if you
haven't already done so, subscribe. Tell a friend.
It's really important. So I'll catch you guys
in the new year with the new episode with my
past PhD supervisor, Dr. Glynn Williams -Jones.
Remember, I'm going to do that encore edition
for the next episode in two weeks. I'll see you
then. Swaying to rhythms as the galaxies fly
by. Ooh, we're tuned in, feeling the beat of
the unknown. Can you hear it? It echoes deep
in our bones. Chasing down wonders, always seeking
more