Speaker 1: All right, so let's try and unpack this. There's this feeling,
you know, the one you get when a rule you
thought was totally fixed, a law of nature almost just
gets shattered right in front of you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that sense of cosmic displacement. I know exactly what
you mean.
Speaker 1: I had this happen to me once. I was driving
really late at night, way out in the middle nowhere,
and I saw this this thing on a side road,
just a blur, a blur. Yeah, it was moving so
fast that it just didn't make sense for the environment.
It wasn't just a car speeding. It felt like it wasn't,
i don't know, operating by the same rules of physics
as everything else.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect analogy, actually, because that feeling is exactly
what we're talking about today, just on an astronomical scale. Okay,
we're talking about object that show up in our solar system,
not from around the block, cosmically speaking, but from completely
outside the Sun's entire sphere of influence.
Speaker 1: So they're not just running a stop sign.
Speaker 2: Moving so fast. Yeah, the stop sign. The whole town
doesn't even have the gravity to slow them down.
Speaker 1: And that's the key, that distinction. We've always had theories.
I mean, it makes sense that stuff from the void
would pass.
Speaker 2: Through, right, is a statistical certainty.
Speaker 1: But to actually see one, to confirm it, and then
to see more, that just rewrites the rule book for
our entire cosmic neighborhood.
Speaker 2: It does, and that's what this deep dive is all about.
We're looking at the discovery of these interstellar visitors. We've
got two main players on the board. It's the first messenger,
the first confirmed messenger. Yeah, a really peculiar high speed mystery.
And then it's much much bigger, much older cousin.
Speaker 1: The theoretical planetbuster.
Speaker 2: An object that carries so much velocity it becomes well
a weapon of cosmic proportions.
Speaker 1: So our mission today is to figure out what makes
these things interstellar, look at the frankly insane physics of
how they move, and then run the simulation, the thought experiment,
the necessary thought experiment. What happens when deep time and
that kind of deep space velocity line up with our planet.
Speaker 2: And that word velocity is going to be the key
to everything. Yeah, it's the one factor that turns just
a big old rock into a threat that can reset
the entire course of life on Earth. So to start,
we really need to nail down the terminology. When we
see an object is interstellar, what does that actually mean?
Speaker 1: It means it's not from around here.
Speaker 2: At all, exactly. It originates completely outside our solar system.
This isn't a comet that, say, Jupiter's gravity kicked into
a weird orbit.
Speaker 1: Or something from the Kuiper Belt way out past Neptune.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is like getting mail, but the return address
is another star system, or maybe it has no return address,
just a drifter unattached to any star that's been wandering
the galaxy for who knows how.
Speaker 1: Long, and for so long. That was just a concept
of model. We figured it had to happen. The universe
is a messy place. But getting confirmation that was a
huge moment.
Speaker 2: It was, and that first visitor was named Umuah. Officially
it's one Eye twenty seventeen U one.
Speaker 1: That designation, the one eye. That's the important part, isn't
it It is?
Speaker 2: The eye stands for interstellar. It was the first of
a completely new class of object. The moment in twenty
seventeen when we could finally track its path with enough
certainty to say this is not bound to our Sun
I love.
Speaker 1: The name though, Umumua. It's Hawaiian, right it is.
Speaker 2: It translates to something like a messenger from Afar arriving first.
Speaker 1: You can't get more fitting than that. It was the herald.
It told us they were out there.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't just that it was there, it was
how was behaving. The initial shock was all about its speed,
its velocity.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's break that down, because this is where the
whole threat discussion starts. What's like a normal speed for
our local stuff, commets, asteroids in.
Speaker 2: Our solar system, things are moving pretty fast, but they're
all sort of tethered by the Sun's gravity. So you're
typically looking at speeds around twenty kilometers a.
Speaker 1: Second, which is about twelve miles per second. That's already
hard to wrap your head around.
Speaker 2: It is. It's incredibly fast, but it's the speed limit
of our neighborhood. You could say if the speed of
things that stuck in the Sun's gravitational well, and uh
Mumua just blew right past that speed limit. When we
clocked it on its way out of our solar system,
it was still moving at eighty seven kilometers per second.
Eighty seven fifty four miles per second.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's not just a little faster, that's what
more than four times the local speed?
Speaker 2: Yes, And that immediately tells you everything you need to
know about its journey. That speed guarantees what we call
a hyperbolic trajectory.
Speaker 1: That's the key term, right.
Speaker 2: It is if something is moving in an orbit, its
path is an ellipse. It keeps coming back. Yeah, But
if it's moving above a certain speed the Sun's escape velocity,
is path is a hyperbola. It comes in, swings around
the Sun once, and it's gone.
Speaker 1: It's never coming back.
Speaker 2: Never. The fact that its speed was so high meant
it could only have come from deep space. It arrived
here already carrying tremendous momentum from somewhere else.
Speaker 1: So we could be talking about an object that got
what sling shot it out of its home star system,
maybe hundreds of light years away exactly.
Speaker 2: Maybe it got kicked out by a giant planet or
close pass with its star, and then it just coasted.
It traveled through the cold dark void for maybe a
billion years, holding onto that speed the whole time a
billion years. That momentum was gained somewhere else in a
totally different environment, and thankfully, I mean really thankfully, the
calculation showed it was no threat to us.
Speaker 1: Its trajectory was safe completely.
Speaker 2: It cut through our system, gave us a little bit
of a shock, and then headed back out. It's on
its way toward the constellation Pegas is right now.
Speaker 1: It'll just keep going for millions, maybe.
Speaker 2: Hundreds of millions more years. We were just a tiny
little waypoint on an absolutely epic galactic journey.
Speaker 1: So even after we knew and Mumu was safe, the
weirdness didn't stop. It just kept piling up.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the mystery was just beginning. Long after it
passed by, scientists were still arguing about its basic physical properties.
Speaker 1: Starting with its shape. It wasn't the usual lumpy, potato
shaped rock we see in the asteroid belt.
Speaker 2: Not at all. That's what was so strange. The data
from its light curve, how its brightness changed as it tumbled,
suggested an extreme shape. The best estimate was that it
was maybe ten times longer than it was wide.
Speaker 1: Which led to all those headlines about a cosmic cigar.
Speaker 2: Right or a cucumber or TUTSI roll. I think I
even saw a comparison to a submarine sandwich.
Speaker 1: A belly buster turkey and bacon sub I think was
the specific one.
Speaker 2: The point is its elongation was extreme. We just don't
see objects shaped like that in our solar system.
Speaker 1: Why not? Why are ours all lumpy?
Speaker 2: Well, it's generally down to gravity and collisions. Over billions
of years. Things tend to either pull themselves into a
rough sphere if they're big enough, or they get smashed
into irregular potato like shapes. A long, thin needle or
cigar shape suggests a very very specific kind of formation
or and this is where the speculation really took off.
It suggests it's not natural, that it's an artificial construct.
Speaker 1: And it was tumbling too, right, not just spinning neatly.
Speaker 2: It was in a chaotic tumble, spinning on multiple axes
as it flew. But even that wasn't the biggest mystery.
The real hit scratcher, The thing that launched a thousand
scientific papers was the acceleration anomaly. Okay, so what's that
When we tracked its path past the Sun, after we
accounted for the pull of the Sun's gravity, it was
still moving faster than it should have been.
Speaker 1: Something else was pushing it. A non gravitational.
Speaker 2: Push exactly, something was giving it a little extra kick. Now,
with comets, this is normal. We see this all the time.
Speaker 1: Right as they get close to the sun. The ice
heats up, turns to gas, and shoots out in jets
like little rocket thrusters.
Speaker 2: Precisely, that process is called outgassing, and it gives the
comet that push. But for that to happen, you need
to see the telltale sign of.
Speaker 1: A comet, the coma, that big fuzzy halo of gas
and dust around it, and the tail.
Speaker 2: And Umu had neither no coma, no tail, nothing. It
just looked like a dead rock, a dead rock that
was mysteriously accelerating.
Speaker 1: And that's the moment the alien hypothesis really took hold.
Speaker 2: It is, if it's being propelled but not by normal
common activity, then maybe the propulsion is deliberate.
Speaker 1: The solar sale idea, the solar.
Speaker 2: Sale or light sale, was the most dramatic theory put forward.
The idea was that maybe Umamura was a piece of
alien technology, a probe or a scoutship, or maybe just
some space junk using the pressure from sunlight itself to accelerate.
Speaker 1: And we should be clear that's not just science fiction.
Solar sale technology is real. Humans have successfully launched spacecraft
that use it.
Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely, the physics is sound. It was a plausible,
if exotic explanation for what we were seeing. It was
incredibly tantalized.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't the consensus, was it.
Speaker 2: No. After years of debate in analyzing the data, the
majority of the scientific community landed on a different explanation,
one that's still strange but natural. The conclusion was that
probably was a comment after all, just a very very
weird one.
Speaker 1: Okay, But how do they explain the missing tail. If
it's a comment and it's outgassing, where's the gas?
Speaker 2: That's the twist. The leading theory now is hydrogen outcasting
hydrogen ice exactly. The idea is that Umulua formed in
a part of its home system that was so incredibly
cold that hydrogen gas actually froze solid. It became a
hydrogen iceberg. Wow, as a got near our sun, that
solid hydrogen deep inside it would have started to sublimate,
turned directly into gas. That gas would escape and provide
the push the acceleration.
Speaker 1: Well, why couldn't we see it?
Speaker 2: Because hydrogen gas is transparent, It's incredibly light, and it
would dispoose almost instantly. It wouldn't drag dust in heavier
molecules with it to create that visible coma and tail
that you get from water ice or carbon dioxide ice.
Speaker 1: So it had invisible.
Speaker 2: Jets essentially, yes, invisible propulsion. It was a unique chemical
makeup that led to a unique physical behavior. It was
borne in conditions so different from our own solar system
that it broke all our existing rules for what a
comet should look like.
Speaker 1: So the big takeaway from MUA isn't just that these
things exist. It's so that they can be fundamentally chemically
different from anything we know, and that they can carry
these immense velocities, which of course opens up the next
big question. If a small one can do this, what
happens if a really really big one comes along?
Speaker 2: And that brings us directly to the ancient grandfather of
these objects three iet lists atls.
Speaker 1: So this was found much more recently in twenty twenty five,
and it's already been confirmed as the third interstellar object.
Speaker 2: That's right, And if a Wumumoo was like a speedy
little scout three ietlesses, well, it's more like an ancient battleship.
It's moving at similar deadly speeds, but its story is
one of deep, deep time.
Speaker 1: The time scale is what gets me, oohm. Ou might
have been traveling for millions of years, which is already
a long time, but Atlis is on another level, entirely.
Speaker 2: A completely different scale. Yeah. The current thinking is that
three iet Liss is almost certainly older than our entire
solar system.
Speaker 1: Okay, han On, let's really process that our Sun, the Earth,
all the planets, they formed about four and a half
billion years years ago direct and you're saying this thing
was already out there flying through space before any of
that existed.
Speaker 2: That's what the evidence points to. Some estimates put its
age at seven billion years old, maybe even older. And
its origin story is just as fascinating.
Speaker 1: Where did it come from?
Speaker 2: It seems to have originated in what's called the milky
ways thick disc. Now we live in the thin disc,
the familiar flat spiral arms of the galaxy, right. The
thick disc is a much older, more puffed up region
of stars that surrounds the thin disc. It's populated by
primeval stars, stars that formed in a much more violent,
chaotic era of the galaxy's youth.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about a completely different stellar environment, a
time when the galaxy was still I don't know, settling down.
Speaker 2: Yes, and the chemical composition of everything was different. The
building blocks available for making planets and commets were not
the same as the ones in the cloud that formed
our Sun.
Speaker 1: The elements were different.
Speaker 2: The ratios of elements were different. The material in the
thick disc has survived billions of years of cosmic history,
so Atl's isn't just an object. It's a pristine time
capsule from an age before the Earth was even a.
Speaker 1: Speck of dust, and that ancient origin explains the weird
data we got from its composition.
Speaker 2: It does. As it got closer to the Sun, we
were able to analyze the gases it was giving off,
and they were puzzled by what they found, unusually high
levels of nickel and.
Speaker 1: Iron, which isn't typical for our local comets, not at all.
Speaker 2: Our comments are mostly water, ice, dust, silicates. They have
some metals, but not blasting out in these kinds of concentrations.
It suggests a different kind of core, maybe denser, more
metal rich, something forged in the conditions of that ancient
thick disk.
Speaker 1: So it's this ancient metal infused heart wrapped in ice
that's been flying through space for seven billion years.
Speaker 2: That's the picture. And what's interesting is that, unlike Umoa,
it's actually behaving like a proper comet.
Speaker 1: Oh so this one does have a tail.
Speaker 2: It does a big one. The Hubble telescope got some
great images of it in twenty twenty five. It has
the classic coma, the halo of dust and gas, and
the long tail. It's blasting out huge amounts of water
and carbon dioxide ice, just like a textbook comb It should.
Speaker 1: A very very old textbook.
Speaker 2: A very old textbook from a different library.
Speaker 1: Yes, okay, let's talk size, because this is where the
fear factor really kicks in. How big are we talking?
Speaker 2: The estimates are still a bit wide. It's hard to
see the solid nucleus inside that huge bright coma. But
the range we're looking at is a minimum of about
four hundred and forty meters about a quarter of a
mile across.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's already pretty big.
Speaker 2: But the maximum estimate goes all the way up to
five point six kilometers three and a half miles in diameter.
Speaker 1: Whoah, okay, three and a half miles wide. If Umua
was a cosmic cucumber. Atls is a flying mountain.
Speaker 2: At its largest estimate. Yeah, it could be up to
fourteen times bigger than Umua. Yeah, and that size puts
it firmly in the potential planetbuster categories, well over the
threshold for causing a global catastrophe on impact.
Speaker 1: Now, before we go down that rabbit hole, we have
to be absolutely clear this specific object three I at
less it's.
Speaker 2: Not going to hit us, absolutely not. It is one
hundred percent safe. We've tracked its trajectory very carefully.
Speaker 1: We can all breathe a sigh of relief.
Speaker 2: Yes, its closest approach to US is in December twenty
twenty five. But it's going to be about two hundred
and seventy million kilometers away. That's one hundred and seventy
million miles. It's not even close.
Speaker 1: But it is passing through the neighborhood in a pretty
interesting way.
Speaker 2: It is. It's actually going to pass inside the orbit
of Mars.
Speaker 1: Really.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's going to miss Mars by about twenty eight
million kilometers, which is only eighteen million miles on a
cosmic scale. For an object this big and this fast,
that is an incredibly close shave.
Speaker 1: It's a real reminder that the Solar System is a
shooting gallery.
Speaker 2: And of course it led to the alien hypothesis round two.
Speaker 1: Naturally, if Umumama was a scout ship, then the giant
metal rich Atlas must be the mother ship.
Speaker 2: That was the suggestion for the same group of researchers. Yes,
but again that idea is really on the fringe. The
scientific mainstream is treating this as what it appears to be,
an ancient, massive, and incredibly valuable natural comet. The questions
it raises are about geology and cosmology, not technology.
Speaker 1: But those geological questions, combined with that incredible speed, lead
us right to the big one, the terrifying but necessary
thought experiment.
Speaker 2: What if the geometry had been just a little bit different.
Speaker 1: Okay, so this is where we have to really dig
into the physics of survival. This is hypothetical, but it's
crucial for understanding the stakes of planetary defense. Let's set
the stage. What if that nudge Atlas got seven billion
years ago put it on a slightly different path. What
if Earth was in the crosshairs.
Speaker 2: To understand an impact of this magnitude, we have to
start with our baseline. The most famous impact in Earth's history,
the chixelab asteroid.
Speaker 1: The Dinosaur Killer. Remind us of the specs on that one.
Speaker 2: Chikisel was big, about ten kilometers one so six miles.
It was a carbonaceous asteroid, so mostly rock, minerals and some.
Speaker 1: Metal, and its speed.
Speaker 2: It was coming in at a pretty standard speed for
a Solar system object, about twenty kilometers per.
Speaker 1: Second, and that impact at that size and speed caused
a global extinction, wiped out seventy percent of life, left
a crater over one hundred kilometers wide. That's our baseline.
Speaker 2: That's the baseline. Now let's bring in three ilsts. We'll
use the maximum size estimate of five point six.
Speaker 1: Kilometers, so it's about half the diameter of the Dinosaur Killer.
Speaker 2: Roughly half the diameter and probably less dense, less massive
because it has all that ice compared to Chickalob's solid rock.
So if you only looked at size and mass, you
might think, okay, less destructive.
Speaker 1: But there's the velocity problem. That's the game changer.
Speaker 2: That's the entire game. Chick Salobe hit at twenty kilometers
per second three ia to ls is moving at a
minimum of sixty one kilometers.
Speaker 1: Per second more than three times faster.
Speaker 2: Three times faster. And this is where the math gets
absolutely brutal. The physics is exponential.
Speaker 1: Explain that for us. Why I speed so much more
important than size.
Speaker 2: Here it all comes down to the formula for kinetic energy,
the energy of motion. It's one half mass times velocity
squared k E equals twelve Miliva is.
Speaker 1: Squared, the velocity is squared.
Speaker 2: The velocity is square. That's the killer. So if you
double the velocity, you quadruple the energy. If you triple
the velocity like we have here, you increase the kinetic
energy by a factor of nine.
Speaker 1: So even though ATLS has less mass, every bit of
that mass hits with nine times the energy because of
the speed.
Speaker 2: Exactly when you run all the numbers, accounting for the
different densities and everything, the conclusion is just staggering. If
three I addols were to hit Earth, it would impact
with four and a half times the total energy of
the chick slab.
Speaker 1: Impact four and a half times.
Speaker 2: This isn't just another mass extinction event. This is a
planetary sterilization event. Yeah, hashtag tag tag the immediate cataclysm
in under second.
Speaker 1: Okay, four and a half times the energy that killed
the dinosaurs. It's almost impossible to picture. Let's try us
through the first few seconds of an impact like that.
Speaker 2: At sixty one kilometers per second, it moves through our
entire atmosphere from space to the ground in just over
one second.
Speaker 1: So there's no time for it to burn up or
slow down.
Speaker 2: The atmosphere might as well not be there. It hits
the crust with such force that the impact site doesn't shatter,
it vaporizes the comet and a huge chunk of the
Earth's crust are instantly converted into a superheated plasma.
Speaker 1: So it's not making a crater so much as it's
creating a temporary star on the surface of the Earth.
Speaker 2: That's a good way to put it. That plasma core
would incinerate everything for hundreds of miles around, but the
destruction spreads much faster than that through the shockwave.
Speaker 1: A shockwave from an impact of that energy.
Speaker 2: It would propagate across the continent, across the globe. The
air itself becomes a weapon. The compression wave would generate
winds of over one thousand kilometers per hour.
Speaker 1: That's what six hundred miles an hour that's not wind,
that's a solid.
Speaker 2: Wall of force it is. It's a blast wave that
would scour the landscape clean. It would flatten cities, vaporized forests,
level mountains.
Speaker 1: I remember feeling a minor earthquake once, just a little trimmer,
and the terrifying thing was the ground itself feeling unreliable.
Speaker 2: This would trigger earthquakes globally that would register it beyond
anything the Richter scale was designed to measure. It would
cause volcanoes to erupt on the other side of the planet.
And if it hit the ocean, mile high tsunamis not
waves that crash on the coast, but waves that would
wash hundreds of kilometers inland, just erasing everything. But the
fire is maybe the worst part. The impact would throw
trillions of tons of molten rock ejecta back up into
the atmophere on ballistic trajectories. These glowing hot beads of
glass would rain down all over the planet.
Speaker 1: So it's not just the impact site that burns.
Speaker 2: The entire sky would heat up to the temperature of
pizza oven. It'd be hot enough to ignite every forest,
every blade of grass on the entire planet. A global firestorm.
Speaker 1: So within the first hour, maybe the first day. You're
dealing with a plasma blast, hypersonic shockwave, global earthquakes, megasunamis,
in a planetary firestorm.
Speaker 2: The chances of survival for any complex life on the
surface are effectively zero. But that's just the opening act.
The immediate cataclysm is what gives way to the real
long term planet killer effects hashtag tag do long term
global killer. So once the initial chaos of the impact
subsides phase two begins, all that material that was blasted
into the sky, the vaporized comet, the dirt, the soot
from the fires, it doesn't just disappear.
Speaker 1: It stays up there, creating a shroud around the entire planet.
Speaker 2: A thick global shroud, and that leads directly to an
impact winter, or more accurately, a nuclear winter.
Speaker 1: A supercharged version of it.
Speaker 2: Exactly. This cloud of dust and aerosols would be so
thick it would block out the sun, not just dim it,
but block it out completely. The sky would go.
Speaker 1: Dark and temperatures would plummet, plunge.
Speaker 2: The surface of the Earth would drop to freezing and
stay there for years, possibly for decades, a deep, relentless
global winter.
Speaker 1: And if there's no sunlight.
Speaker 2: Photosynthesis stole ops instantly, the entire foundation of the global
food chain is cut off at the knees. Plants dye
clanked in and the oceans dye, and then everything that
eats them dies. Widespread global starvation is the primary killer
in the post impact world.
Speaker 1: And the atmosphere itself becomes toxic.
Speaker 2: It does as all that debris starts to slowly rain
back down and chemically alters the air. The impact creates
huge amounts of nitrogen and sulfur oxides.
Speaker 1: Which means acid rain, extreme.
Speaker 2: Acid rain, strong enough to poison the oceans and sterilize
any soil that wasn't already burned or frozen. And there's more.
The energy of the impact would blast away the ozone layer,
so when the sun finally did come back, the surface
would be bathed in lethal uv radiation.
Speaker 1: And the colmet itself was full.
Speaker 2: Of metals, right, All that nickel and iron from ATLA
would rain down to leading to widespread toxic metal poisoning
of whatever water was left. It's just it's a multi
pronged attack on the entire biosphere. You freeze it, you
starve it, you poison it, and then you radiate it
hashtag tag tag the climate paradox, deep freeze, discorging recovery.
But there's one final awful twist in this story, a
climate paradox that's specific to an impact from a comet
like three iatl Ice.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we have the ste freeze that last for years,
maybe decades, caused by the dust cloud. But eventually that
dust has to settle, right it does.
Speaker 2: The dust and sub particles are heavy. They're what reflects
the sunlight and causes the cooling. But over time gravity
winds and they rain out of the atmosphere. The sky
would slowly start to clear.
Speaker 1: But something else was put up there that doesn't settle.
Speaker 2: Out precisely, the comet itself. Remember three Iatla is largely
made of carbon dioxide.
Speaker 1: Ice, a giant block of frozen text tootda.
Speaker 2: Which was completely vaporized in the impact. All of that
carbon dioxide. It was released directly into the atmosphere as
a gas, and unlike dust, text toodp gas can stay
in the atmosphere for centuries.
Speaker 1: And it's a greenhouse gas, a very potent.
Speaker 2: One one of the most potent. So as the dust
clears and the sunlight starts to get through again. You
now have an atmosphere that's supercharged with tixto ten to two.
It acts like a thick thermal blanket trapping the Sun's heat.
Speaker 1: So the planet goes from one extreme to the other violently.
Speaker 2: You go from a deep freeze, a nuclear winter that
kills almost everything, and then as the planet tries to recover,
it swings into a period of extreme runaway global warming.
Speaker 1: First you freeze, then you bake.
Speaker 2: First a deep freeze followed by a long, scorching recovery.
It's a one to two punch that makes the planet
completely uninhabitable for an incredibly long time. And it shows
that this class of object, these high velocity interstellar visitors,
they're a unique and terrifying.
Speaker 1: Kind of threat where the speed is so much more
important than the size.
Speaker 2: It forces us to realize that planetary defense isn't just
about looking for big rocks in our own backyard. It's
about looking for these ancient messengers coming in hot from
the depths of the galaxy hashtag tag outro So.
Speaker 1: We circle back to the good news, the slightly boring
but incredibly comforting reality three i E. Less is not
going to hit us it's.
Speaker 2: Flying safely past. The math is solid. We're fine, and.
Speaker 1: That safety is what lets us change your perspective to
stop looking at it as a doomsday machine and start
looking at it as what it.
Speaker 2: Really is, a priceless opportunity, a piece of primordial history,
just swinging by for a brief.
Speaker 1: Visit, a visit that's been maddeningly difficult for astronomers to
get a good look at.
Speaker 2: That's the irony, isn't it. This incredible object is here,
but because of its trajectory and where it is in
the sky relative to the Sun, getting a clear, detailed
look at it with our telescopes is incredibly challenging.
Speaker 1: It's like a cosmic treasure chest is floating by, but
the keyhole is facing the wrong way.
Speaker 2: But it's moving so fast. We only get this one
fleeting glimpse before it disappears back into the void forever.
We can't send a probe to it, we can't catch
up to it. We just get this one snapshot of
a seven billion year old traveler.
Speaker 1: But even that snapshot is so valuable immensely.
Speaker 2: It's a physical sample of the early universe. It's a
time capsule from before our sun even lit up, carrying
the raw materials from the Milky Way's thick disk that
high nickel and i iron content. It challenges our models
of how the building blocks of galaxies come together.
Speaker 1: So this knowledge, this is how we learned about the
galaxy's violent, ancient past. These objects are the.
Speaker 2: Proof they are. They remind us that the Solar System
isn't some isolated island. We are part of a vast,
interconnected galaxy, and matter and energy from deep time and
deep space are constantly flowing through our neighborhood.
Speaker 1: Their proof of a kind of galactic connectivity, bringing the
history of the whole Milky Way right to our front door.
Speaker 2: Condensed into a single object.
Speaker 1: Here and that thought of history being carried on an
object moving at these unbelievable speeds, that gives me a
final idea to chew on. We've just spent all this
time talking at an object that carries the secrets of
the galaxies primordial past seven billion years ago, tells us
where we.
Speaker 2: Came from, Right, It's a message from the beginning.
Speaker 1: But if these hypervelocity objects are like cosmic time travelers,
what about the other direction?
Speaker 2: What do you mean?
Speaker 1: Well, if this visitor carries in information about the galaxy's formation.
What kind of secrets would a theoretical object from the
end of the universe carry? Wow, Imagine something launched somehow
from the ultimate heat death of the Cosmos five billion
years in our future. If that object traveled back through
time and space to us, what would it tell us
about the fate of all matter, the final collapse of stars,
our ultimate future, the.
Speaker 2: Beginning and the end of the universe, both traveling at
eighty seven kilometers per second.
Speaker 1: Now that's the real mystery. These discoveries unlock something to
think about until our next deep dive.