Speaker 1: Okay, let's just start with a thought experiment. Imagine the
most remote, chaotic place you can think of, a place
where the gravitational pull of our entire galaxy is just
as strong as the Sun's.
Speaker 2: That's already hard to even picture.
Speaker 1: Right now, Imagine an object from that exact place, a
primordial visitor besides of a small country, just wandering into
our solar system.
Speaker 2: And it's not behaving like anything we'd.
Speaker 1: Expect, not at all. It's not just big, it's acting weird.
It's too active, it's way too dark, and it's just
it's too far away to be doing what it's doing.
Speaker 2: Well, that object you're describing, it's very real. It's C
twenty fourteen U and two seventy one, but it's better
known as the Bernard Nelli Bernstein Commet, or just the
BB commet exactly, and you're right, it's a rival is
forcing scientists to basically rethink everything, solar system dynamics, the
orc cloud, even the you know, the basic physics of
how a comet lights up.
Speaker 1: So that's our mission for this deep dive. We're going
to be unpacking the insights from the research. And the
analeis compiled by geophysicists Stefan Burns. We're going to look
at the BB commets just unbelievable scale and it's totally
anomalous behavior.
Speaker 2: We're going way out to the fringes today. We'll unpack
why this thing is so massive, explore its chaotic origins
and deep space, and get into why it's activity so
far from the Sun is creating what you could call
a nonlinear system, basically something truly unpredictable.
Speaker 1: And because the universe seems to love a good story,
we'll also take a quick look at its smaller stranger
cousin that's visiting right now, the interstellar object three iet lice.
Speaker 2: Ah, Yes, the interstellar visitor, and we're going to reveal
a really remarkable cosmic synchronicity that connects its passage to
planetary alignments happening right here.
Speaker 1: So we're talking cosmic scale, fundamental chaos, and some really
surprising connections. Let's get into it.
Speaker 2: Let's do it.
Speaker 1: So when we talk about C twenty fourteen UN two
seventy one, the first thing we really have just to
nail down is the sheer size.
Speaker 2: It's staggering, it really is. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The analysis drawing from describes it as quite bizarre and
more importantly immense. The current estimates, and these are based
on observations going all the way back to twenty ten,
they put it solid nucleus at around one hundred and
fifty kilometers in diameter.
Speaker 2: One hundred and fifty kilometers, and that number is where
you really start to grasp how unique this thing is.
You have to put it in perspective because in space,
you know, big can mean a lot of things, right,
It's all relative exactly, So NASA gives us some really
great context for this thing. About Haley's comment, it's the
iconic comet, right, it's captured human imagination for centuries, millennia,
even millennia. Well, it's nucleus is barely seven miles across.
It's basically a tiny icy potato floating through space.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I remember seeing Hailbop in the nineties. Yeah, and
that felt absolutely monumental. You could see it with the
naked eye. It was this huge thing in the sky.
Speaker 2: And Hailbop was a monster for its time. It checked
in at around forty six miles across. That felt like,
you know, the upper limit for a really dynamic, spectacular commet.
Speaker 1: And then comes bib.
Speaker 2: And then comes the BB comet, which just completely breaks
the scale. Its estimated sizes eighty five miles across. It
completely dwarfs Talebop. It's by a huge mangin. It's the
second largest known comet that acts like a comet.
Speaker 1: And you said that estimate is pretty solid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's considered reasonably solid. The reason is because the
researchers Bernard and Ellie and Bernstein, they did this incredible
work of sifting through years, decades of historical sky catalogs
to track its path backward in time. So we have
a really long observational baseline on it.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if it's the second largest, what's the biggest.
Speaker 2: The only known object that's bigger and is also categorized
as a comet is something called the centaur Chiron. It's
a colossal two hundred and twenty kilometers in diameter.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: But and this is the absolutely crucial difference that the
material we're looking at really emphasizes. Chiron is a permanent resident.
Speaker 1: What do you mean a resident?
Speaker 2: It orbits between Jupiter and Uranus. It's captor. It's locked
into the gravitational dance of our solar system and never
leaves that inner environment. It's active, it has a coma,
but it's one of ours. It's domesticated.
Speaker 1: You could say, okay, so chiron is a known quantity,
more or less, more or less.
Speaker 2: But the BB commet. It's a visitor from the deepest, darkest,
coldest fringes of everything. It's what you might call a
truly pristine, primordial object.
Speaker 1: And we know this because of its orbit.
Speaker 2: We know this because of its orbit. The calculations show
its furthest distance from the Sun, what astronomers call its aphelion,
was somewhere between an astonishing forty thousand and sixty thousand
astronomical units.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's pause on that number for a second. Forty
thousand AU.
Speaker 2: It's mind boggling.
Speaker 1: So one AU is the distance from the Earth to
the Sun, the official boundary of our solar system's little bubble,
the heliosphere, that only goes out to about one hundred AU. Right,
You're saying, this thing spends most of its life four
hundred times further away than the edge of the Sun's
direct influence.
Speaker 2: That's exactly it. And what's so fascinating is that when
you're that far out, the Sun's gravitational poll is incredibly weak.
The object is only, as they say, loosely bound to
the Sun. It means that at its furthest point, it's
in a region where the gravitational pull of the entire
Milky Way galaxy, the collective mass of billions of stars,
starts to become just as strong, or maybe even stronger
than the Sun's direct pole. They call it the galactic tide.
Speaker 1: So it's being pulled in two directions at once, by
the Sun and by the whole galaxy.
Speaker 2: Which leads to its orbit being described as a stochastic system.
Speaker 1: Stochastic just means random, right, chaotic.
Speaker 2: It's fundamentally chaotic and random, because it's so far out
the gravity of the galaxy itself, that subtle constant pole
can nudge its orbit, And then you have to factor
in any passing stars.
Speaker 1: But stars passing each other is super rare, isn't it?
Speaker 2: It is? But we're talking about millions, maybe billions of
years over that time scale. The gravitational tug of even
a small brown dwarf for a rogue star passing bike
can completely throw off its.
Speaker 1: Trajectory, a kind of butterfly.
Speaker 2: Effect, a perfect butterfly effect. It means we can't accurately
trace its path back in time, and we can't reliably
predict where it's going to go far into the future.
The system is just it's not deterministic. It's wild.
Speaker 1: So we have this massive, chaotic object coming from a
place where galactic forces are as important as solar ones,
and that directly points to its composition being primordial.
Speaker 2: Exactly because its closest approach this time is only going
to be about ten point ninety five Au. That's roughly
the orbit of Saturn, which is still really far away
it is, and the thinking is that it has probably
never been this close to the Sun before. So the
analysis from stuffan burns suggests it has a composition that
we have literally never seen up close.
Speaker 1: It's like a time capsule.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate time capsule object. You know. When a
typical comet from the inner Orc Cloud or the Kuiper
Belt passes around the Sun, it gets cooked, it gets
processed by the.
Speaker 1: Heat to melt stuff, burns off.
Speaker 2: All the most volatile ices, the things that sublime easily,
they get baked off or depleted. But the BB comet,
having been in a deep freeze forty thousand au out
for billions of years. It's untouched.
Speaker 1: So what we could find on it is pristine material
from the very formation of the Solar System.
Speaker 2: That's the scientific holy grail right there, the exact material conditions,
the isotope ratios, all of it perfectly preserved, untouched by
the Sun's heat. That is the treasure locked inside that
one hundred and fifty kilometer nucleus.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's talk about his current path. The source
material says its trajectory is also really.
Speaker 2: Strange, highly anomalous.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: First, there's its inclination. Its orbit is inclined at ninety
five degrees to the ecliptic plane.
Speaker 1: What does that mean?
Speaker 2: In simple terms, think of the Solar System like a
flat dinner plate or a vinyl record. All the planets
are spinning on the surface of that plate. Okay, This
object is coming at us almost perfectly top down, like
a massive plumbline dropped from above, cutting straight through the
plate at a right angle.
Speaker 1: So it's not traveling in the same plane as Earth,
in Mars and Jupiter. It's coming from up.
Speaker 2: Or down exactly. And as of the time of this analysis,
which was based on observations around late November it had
already swung in from above and was positioned directly underneath
the Solar System.
Speaker 1: That geometry is fascinating. It means it's not just interacting
with the planets one by one, it's interacting with the
entire plane of the Solar System as a whole, in
a way that comets traveling along the Ecliptic just don't.
Speaker 2: Right. Its gravitational influences felt differently.
Speaker 1: And even though it's so huge, you said, it's not
diving deep into the inner system.
Speaker 2: No, it's closest approach it's perihelion that's coming up in
January twenty thirty one, but it will only get as
close as ten point nine to five AU. It's just
barely going to reach the orbit of Saturn, which.
Speaker 1: Is really unusual for something that came in from that
far away, isn't it. You'd think gravity would pull it
in much closer.
Speaker 2: You would, But this sort of hanging back is part
of what makes it so unique. And after that closest
approach near Saturn, it's not going to stick around.
Speaker 1: It's on its way out again, right, It's.
Speaker 2: Going to swing back up cut straight through the ecliptic plane.
On August eight twenty thirty three, and then continue its
journey out of the Solar system high above the planets.
Speaker 1: And the timing of that crossing is interesting too.
Speaker 2: It is right now we're in a period of high
solar activity solar maximum, but that crucial crossing in twenty
thirty three is likely to happen during a solar minimum.
Speaker 1: Though the Sun's energy output will be much lower. The
solar wind will be weaker.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and that could totally change how the material it's
shedding interacts with the Sun's magnetic fields and plasma. It
just adds another layer of complexity to an already completely
chaotic object.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's move from its size and origin and dive
into its behavior, because this is where the story gets
even stranger.
Speaker 2: This is where the real mystery is.
Speaker 1: We expect comets to get active, to light up when
they get close enough to the Sun for the ice
to start boiling off. But this thing started having these
huge spontaneous outbursts when it was twenty six a.
Speaker 2: Away, twenty six AU that's out near the orbit of Neptune.
Speaker 1: So to understand why that's so bizarre, we have to
talk about the inverse square law.
Speaker 2: Right and let's make this simple. The inverse square law
just means that the Sun's energy, its light and heat,
drops off really really fast the further away you get it.
Speaker 1: So if you double your distance from the Sun, the
energy you receive isn't cut in.
Speaker 2: Half, No, it drops by a factor of four. It's
the distance squared. So think about it like this, Earth
gets one hundred percent of the Sun's energy at ONEAU.
By the time you get out to Neptune at around
thirty AU, you're getting less than one point one percent
of that energy.
Speaker 1: It's a rounding error. So the energy hitting the bb
comet at twenty six AU is minuscule. You could be
standing on its surface and you would barely feel any
warmth from the Sun at all, and.
Speaker 2: Yet it's exploding with activity. It's like trying to boil
a giant pot of water with a single birthday candle
from across the room. The heat is almost nothing.
Speaker 1: But something is causing these volatile materials to just erupt.
Speaker 2: The analysis detected carbon monoxide, carbon dide, dioxide, and ammonia.
These are all things with super low sublimation temperatures. They
go straight from a solid ice to a gas with
just a tiny bit of energy, which goes.
Speaker 1: Right back to the idea that it's primordial, only an
object that's never been baked by the sun, which still
have so much of that easy to boil stuff right
on the.
Speaker 2: Surface exactly, and the activity isn't just a little fizz.
The numbers are staggering right now. Its steady state loss
is about one thousand kilograms of dust and gas every second,
every single second, and that's not even counting the big
violent outbursts.
Speaker 1: The source mentioned those two.
Speaker 2: There have been reports of these spontaneous events ejecting over
one hundred million kilograms of dust, ice, and gas in
less than a day.
Speaker 1: One hundred million kilograms. That's a colossal amount of material
just being injected into the lower part of our solar system.
Speaker 2: And that rapid ejection of mass acts like a rocket engine.
It provides what's called non gravitational acceleration. The jets of
gas are literally pushing the comet around, nudging its orbit
just a little bit.
Speaker 1: Adding to the chaos we were talking about earlier.
Speaker 2: It just makes it even more unpredictable, which brings us
back to the sources repeated warning that this system is
non linear and.
Speaker 1: Nonlinear means the outputs are not proportional to the inputs.
A little change in energy could cause a massive disproportionate
change behavior.
Speaker 2: It's the perfect setup for a black Swan event, something sudden, unexpected,
high impact that none of the current models saw coming.
Speaker 1: So what are the current models predicting right now?
Speaker 2: Based on its assumed activity, The models estimate its brightness
will peak around a parent magnitude thirteen when it gets
closest in twenty thirty one.
Speaker 1: Which is super dim. You'd need a pretty big telescope
to see that.
Speaker 2: You would, But the source Stefan Burns suggests that given
how active it is already, that estimate is almost certainly
a massive understatement. It's highly likely to change.
Speaker 1: And one of the key factors in that unpredictability is
how dark it is.
Speaker 2: It's albedo. Yeah. Albedo is just the measure of how
much light something reflects, and the bb comet has a
shockingly low albedo.
Speaker 1: It's darker than asphalt or coal. It only reflects about
four percent of the light that hits it.
Speaker 2: The implications of that are enormous. If it's only reflecting
four percent of the Sun's energy, it's absorbing ninety six percent.
Speaker 1: It's just soaking it all up.
Speaker 2: Like a giant black rock in space, just storing up
all that solar energy as it gets closer and closer.
And if that dark insulating crust on the surface is
suddenly breached.
Speaker 1: Maybe by one of those violent outbursts.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it could expose all that pristine, highly volatile ice
underneath to direct sunlight for the first time. That could
trigger a massive, unpredictable chain reaction of outgassing. It could
get dramatically brighter, way faster than anyone expects.
Speaker 1: The dark surface is what maximizes the potential for a
catastrophic energy release.
Speaker 2: It does. And this leads us right into the most
unique physical trait of this object. It's gravity, its own gravity,
it's unique gravitational dynamics. This is a key insight from
the analysis that we really have to break down. When
we talk about normal commets, we just assume that any
gas or dust that boils off, it's gone. It just
flies off into space and forms the coma and the tail.
Speaker 1: And that's true for smaller commets like Hayley's right, their
gravity is basically zero.
Speaker 2: It's negligible. Once a particle is launched by that sublimation process,
it hits escape velocity almost instantly and it's gone for good.
Speaker 1: But the BB comet, at one hundred and fifty kilometers across,
is different. It has a significant gravity.
Speaker 2: Well, it's big enough that its own gravitational field has
to be part of the equation when you calculate its
cometary activity. It can quite literally pull its own tail
back down to the surface.
Speaker 1: Okay, that changes everything.
Speaker 2: It changes the entire process of outgassing. If some gas
or dust gets ejected too slowly, or if it doesn't
quite reach escape velocity, the comet's own gravity will recapture it.
Speaker 1: So for it to even have a visible tail, the
stuff has to be shot out with enough force to
escape its own gravitational pull exactly.
Speaker 2: Think of it like a volcano on a tiny asteroid
versus of all cano on Earth. On the asteroid, the
eruption sends rocks into orbit. On Earth, gravity pulls almost
everything right back down.
Speaker 1: The BB comet is somewhere in between. It's this constant
battle between the force of the sublimation pushing out and
the force of its own gravity pulling in.
Speaker 2: And we have never ever had the chance to study
this effect on a hypermassive commet as it gets this
close to the sun. We've never seen it before.
Speaker 1: So what does that mean for how it will look?
Speaker 2: It could mean anything. Maybe if it recaptures dust, its
coma will look denser but smaller, Or maybe its brightness
won't increase as fast as we expect because so much
of the visible material is just being recycled back onto
the surface.
Speaker 1: Our models just don't have the data for this.
Speaker 2: They don't. This difference in physical behavior is precisely why
its future is so uncertain. Our models lack any observational
data for a comet with this level of self gravitational control.
This is where that nonlinear black Swan potential truly lies.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the BB commet is challenging all our models
of these huge deep space objects. But we can get
some really valuable perspective by looking at the chaos being
caused by its much smaller, much faster cousin three il ass.
Speaker 2: Right, we should definitely pivot to that for a moment,
because even though it's tiny compared to the BB comet,
it's causing its own set of unpredictable problems.
Speaker 1: Right now, and three ialyis is significant because it's a
true interstellar object.
Speaker 2: It's from outside our Solar system entirely just passing through,
and it's getting close. It's cutting inside the orbit of Mars,
and just like the BB comet, its behavior is fundamentally anomalous.
It seems to be a running theme with these visitors
from the void.
Speaker 1: The analysis pointed out one really specific strange feature in
the recent images of it.
Speaker 2: The forward facing jet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a forward facing jet or tail. Now comet tails
are supposed to stream away from the Sun right pushed
by the solar wind.
Speaker 2: They are a tail pointing forward. Is just it's wrong.
It's weird.
Speaker 1: So what could be causing that?
Speaker 2: Well, it could be a few things. Maybe the object
has a really unusual spin axis and it's concentrating all
the outgassing on one specific spot that just happens to
be pointing forward as it moves. Or maybe its internal
structure is really lumpy and irregular, causing the sublimation to
be really asymmetrical.
Speaker 1: Either way, it's not what a simple spherical comet should
be doing, not at all.
Speaker 2: It just goes to show that these interstellar objects, just
like the primordial or cloud objects, they are bringing in
a whole new set of physical dynamics that our standard
solar system models just can't explain.
Speaker 1: Yet, And we should probably mention how hard it is
to even see this stuff. The source notes that the
imaging is extremely difficult.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's a huge technical challenge. To pull out the
faint details of those jets, especially the forward facing one.
Astronomers have to do what's called image.
Speaker 1: Stacking, taking a bunch of pictures and laying them on
top of.
Speaker 2: Each other exactly. We're talking about combining something like fifty
seven to one minute exposures. That's nearly an hour of
total camera time just to pull the faint light from
those gas jets out from all the background noise of space.
The effort involved really tells you how important scientists think
these anomalies are.
Speaker 1: So this is where we shift a little bit. We
go from the purely physical chaos to what the source
material calls cosmic synchronicity.
Speaker 2: Right, we're moving from the physics lab into the observatory
to see how these physical events line up with bigger
cosmic rhythms, And the source highlights a truly remarkable astronomical
alignment that perfectly matches the key dates of three Illis visit.
Speaker 1: This part just blew my mind. Because of Mercury's retrograde motion.
We recently had a series of three exact Mercury Uranus oppositions.
Speaker 2: With the Earth sitting perfectly in the middle of them.
Speaker 1: And these three specific alignments happening so close together, line
up perfectly with the three most important dates of the
three iadalyst transit.
Speaker 2: It's an incredible coincidence. If it is one, let's just
trace the triad. The first opposition was on October twenty ninth. Okay,
that date perfectly matched three ialyiss perihelion, its closest approach
to the Sun, the moment of its peak energy.
Speaker 1: Input, one for one. What about the second?
Speaker 2: The second opposition happened on November nineteenth. That was the
exact date of a big NASA livestream that was all
about three eye alis.
Speaker 1: I remember that the source material said the community was
really excited for but the images they shared were kind
of underwhelming.
Speaker 2: The analysis called them awful. Yeah, but still it was
a massive globally focused moment of communication and information flow
about this interstellar object. And the third one, the third
and final opposition in the sequence is set for December nineteenth,
and that aligns perfectly with three I, at least's closest
approach to Earth.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: The fact that this specific rare planetary geometry, a repeating
tryad of oppositions, lines up so precisely with the objects
three major energetic and communicative moments is well mathematically, it's
almost poetic.
Speaker 1: It really makes me wonder about coincidence, doesn't it. Is
it just random chance or is there some kind of
wider cosmic rhythm we're just starting to know.
Speaker 2: Well, the source material uses the synchronicity to explore the
symbolic meaning of it all, drawing on the traditional archetypes
of these planets.
Speaker 1: So what's the symbolic interpretation.
Speaker 2: Well, when you look at the symbology, ureness is always
connected to radical change, sudden breakthroughs, liberation of understanding. It's
the great awakener.
Speaker 1: And mercury is communication.
Speaker 2: Communication, information, data the mind. And because it's an opposition,
the sun is right there in the middle, which brings
in ideas of consciousness, awareness, illumination, literally shining a light
on things that were hidden in the dark.
Speaker 1: So the argument from the analysis is that the arrival
of these strange unpredictable objects, both the giant BB commet
and the voladal three Iolis is tied to a period
of radical shifts in our own understanding.
Speaker 2: That's the idea. The synchronous events are seen as this illuminating,
awareness provoking transit that three Ilis is essentially bringing in
these unique interstellar light codes that are helping to tune
us into resonance with these much faster and more distant spaces.
Speaker 1: It's about expanding our consciousness beyond just Earth and Mars
and the familiar planets.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The chaos of the objects and the synchronicity of
the alignments are together a kind of message, a reminder
that the entire universe, with all its vastness and unpredictability,
is our actual home. It reframes space exploration not just
as a physical journey, but as an expansion of our
own awareness.
Speaker 1: Let's bring it back to our main event, the BB
Comet and talk about what it means for us right
now and in the future. Because it's not just sitting
out there waiting for twenty thirty one. It's already actively
changing the Solar System.
Speaker 2: It absolutely is because of its current position almost at
a right angle to the ecliptic directly underneath us. It's
already actively participating in the energy of the Solar System.
Speaker 1: It's shedding that thousand kilograms of material every second.
Speaker 2: Right, it is actively littering the entire bottom floor of
the Solar System with vast amounts of this really primordial
dust and gas.
Speaker 1: And this isn't just regular space dusk, pristine volatile stuff
rich in CO two and ammonia iceis.
Speaker 2: This material will spread out and given the comets huge
size and how long it's going to be active, it
could genuinely affect the flow of the solar wind, it
could alter the magnetic environment, It might even impact the
overall structure of the heliosphere. We're seeing a massive, unknown
substance being injected into our local environment, and.
Speaker 1: Its path guarantees this will be a long term thing
for sure.
Speaker 2: Once it swings back up past Saturn, it's going to
continue on its path high above the ecliptic plane. It
will eventually line up above the inner Solar System sometime
around twenty sixty nine. So this one object is going
to be altering our environment and giving us new things
to observe for decades.
Speaker 1: Given all of that scientific potential. A pristine sample of
the deep Solar system. It just screams for emission.
Speaker 2: There's an urgent need for proactive planning, and the analysis
makes a great point because its closest approach is still
years away in twenty thirty one. We have a unique
but limited window of opportunity to actually plan a fly
by mission.
Speaker 1: This is where the amateur astronomy community really shines.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's the best of the community. Enthusiasts, particularly one
amateur sited in the analysis, have already done the map.
They've calculated and plotted out potential orbital maneuvers. They've shown
that there is enough time to design a mission that
could intercept the bb commet around twenty thirty three or
twenty thirty four.
Speaker 1: Can you walk us through how that would even work?
It sounds like a brilliant bit of orbital engineering.
Speaker 2: It is. The proposed plan would send a probe out
from Earth and it would use gravitational sling shots, getting
a speed boost from the gravity of Earth and then
venus to gain the velocity and crucially change its inclination.
Speaker 1: To get out of the flat plane of the Solar
System exactly.
Speaker 2: The goal is to set the probe on a course
to meet the comet just after it crosses the ecliptic
on its way out. That twenty thirty three to twenty
thirty four window is key, because the comet will be
high enough above the plane that we can intercept it
without needing an impossibly huge.
Speaker 1: Amount of fuel and emission like that would be scientifically riceless, invaluable.
Speaker 2: You'd be studying three huge things at once. First, the
properties of ultra deep space, because the comet surface is
literally carrying that environment with it. Second, the primordial composition
of the early Solar system. We could finally confirm or
deny all these hypotheses.
Speaker 1: And third, we'd get to see firsthand the dynamics of
a hypermassive comet. We'd get real data on how one
hundred and fifty kilometer object with its own gravity well
actually behaves when it gets energized. We could watch that
interplay between sublimation and recapture in real time.
Speaker 2: That data would instantly rewrite all our commentary models. And
while the source is clear, there are no techno signatures
suggesting this thing is artificial. It's completely unique dynamics make it,
from a scientific standpoint compulsory to investigate.
Speaker 1: But this amazing future opportunity is really highlighted by a
recent and pretty painful mischance with three.
Speaker 2: IAPP lists the Juno probe. Yeah, that's a cautionary tale
about how slow institutions can be when science needs to
move fast.
Speaker 1: The context here is just it's agonizing. The Juno probe
is orbiting Jupiter right now. It's done incredible work, but
it's scheduled to be de orbited crashed into Jupiter's atmosphere
within months of three iatlas's closest approach.
Speaker 2: So we are about to destroy a perfectly good space
probe while a once in a lifetime interstellar object flies
right past its neighborhood.
Speaker 1: And during that NASA livestream they even talked about it.
They said things like, oh, if we could do something,
we would, But.
Speaker 2: The window to actually do something to divert Juno, even
with its last bit of fuel, was already closed organizational
inertia planning cycles, and they were just too slow to react.
Speaker 1: It's a classic case of scientific opportunity cost. The probe
was going to be destroyed anyway to avoid contaminating Jupiter's moons,
so why not at least try a high risk, high
reward mission use its final moments to gather some data
on an object we may never see again. Missing that
chance really underscores how urgently we need to think about
the bb COMT.
Speaker 2: We have the time, We have almost a decade until perihelion.
We have the chance to plan this one correctly. We
absolutely cannot miss this second opportunity to study a deep
space visitor up close. The cost of just sitting back
and watching is too high.
Speaker 1: It really raises the point that so much of this
is now being driven by the passion of the amateur community,
not the big agencies.
Speaker 2: They're doing the proactive calculations and the bold planning. We
have a clear trajectory, we have a clear timeline for
bb If we miss this window in the early twenty thirties,
we miss the chance to characterize the most massive, most volatile,
most primordial visitor of our lifetimes.
Speaker 1: And that's the real challenge, isn't it turning all this
knowledge into action. We know it's chaotic, we know it's massive.
The analysis gives us all the data we need, the inclination,
the periheri, and the time window, even a potential flight path.
Now the scientific community just has to mobilize and seize
the opportunity this ancient visitor is giving us.
Speaker 2: Well to hope they do.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's wrap up this incredible journey to the absolute
fringes of our solar system. We've been looking at C
twenty fourteen UN two seventy one, the BB comet, and
its scale is just it's off the charts, one hundred
and fifty kilometers across, the second largest known active.
Speaker 2: Comet, and it comes from that chaotic ultra deep space
region over forty thousand AU out. Its composition is completely
utterly primordial.
Speaker 1: We talked about how it's bizarre behavior started shockingly early,
those spontaneous outbursts at twenty six AU, just defying all
our models of solar energy. We established this is the
ultimate non linear system, right.
Speaker 2: It's absorbing almost all incoming energy with its four percent albedo,
and critically, it has its own gravitational well that can
actually recapture its own material. That just fundamentally changes all
the rules of how comets work and makes any kind
of prediction incredibly difficult.
Speaker 1: We also drew that contrast with the fast volatile interstellar
visitor three ialyis we noted it's strange forward facing jet
and that incredible synchronicity linking its key moments with those
powerful mercury Yeurinus.
Speaker 2: Alignments, a synchronos that suggests the arrival of these objects
is tied to a much wider cosmic rhythm of illumination
and the liberation of our own understanding.
Speaker 1: Ultimately, whether it's this immense primordial monster or the volatile
interstellar speedster, these massive events are expanding our consciousness. They're
pushing us beyond the familiar, comfortable inner planets.
Speaker 2: They're challenging our deterministic models and reminding us that the vast,
often chaotic universe is our true home. We are witnessing
something entirely new, scientifically priceless, and completely unpredictable, and.
Speaker 1: That leads us to the final and I think most
critical question for you, the listener, to think about. Given
the chaotic and unpredictable nature of C twenty fourteen UN
two seventy one, its immense size, its unique gravitational control,
those shocking early outbursts, do you think our current conservative
estimates for its brightness and orbit are likely to hold
true until twenty thirty one or as.
Speaker 2: The analysis suggests, are we actually guaranteed a black Swan event,
a moment where this immense dark object suddenly flares up,
becoming dramatically brighter and even more unpredictable than it already is.
Speaker 1: What do you think is going to happen when this
colossal primordial object finally reaches its closest point to the
Sun in January twenty thirty one.
Speaker 2: Let us know your thoughts and your predictions. We will
certainly be checking back in with this monster from deep
space as it continues its incredible and unpredictable journey toward us.