Speaker 1: This is the other side of Midnight with Frank Morano.
Speaker 2: They're running a strange program.
Speaker 1: You all, now here's Frank Morano.
Speaker 3: I am a great lover of science fiction films, and
Speaker 3: I have talked before about my fondness for the film
Speaker 3: Forbidden Planet. I don't know if you've ever seen Forbidden Planet.
Speaker 3: It's from the fifties. Great picture still holds up today.
Speaker 3: It's great drama, it's great science fiction. The special effects
Speaker 3: for its time were quite good, and a great performance
Speaker 3: by Leslie Nielsen in a serious role, and great performance
Speaker 3: by Walter Pigeon as well. But I haven't seen the
Speaker 3: film in years. But there's one part of the film
Speaker 3: where all the guys that are the crew of this
Speaker 3: spaceship go down to this planet to go to this
Speaker 3: machine and get your IQ tested. And the guy that's
Speaker 3: a doctor or something he gets his IQ tested and
Speaker 3: it's just through the roof, through the roof, and then
Speaker 3: the captain of the starship gets his IQ tested and
Speaker 3: it's okay. It's significantly less than the doctor. And the
Speaker 3: guy that's administering these IQ tests says something like, ah,
Speaker 3: well that's okay.
Speaker 2: He's the captain. He just needs a nice, loud, booming voice.
Speaker 2: He doesn't need to be that smart.
Speaker 3: The thing that I felt that I've always made up
Speaker 3: for with any lack of knowledge or insight or humor
Speaker 3: or on my part is I think I have a
Speaker 3: very melodious voice. I think I have a voice that
Speaker 3: can be soothing. I think I have a voice under
Speaker 3: normal circumst dances which you want to fall asleep.
Speaker 2: To or wake up to.
Speaker 3: Right however, I hear the way that I sound with
Speaker 3: a cold, I hear the nasality in my voice, and
Speaker 3: I'm driving myself crazy listening to myself. Now, if that's
Speaker 3: how I'm making myself feel, I can only imagine what
Speaker 3: I'm doing to you. What does that mean? It means
Speaker 3: I have a special treat for you. I have searched
Speaker 3: far and wide for the man with the best voice
Speaker 3: in all of radio, and he also happens to be
Speaker 3: pretty intelligent. And that is Steve Kates, aka Doctor Sky,
Speaker 3: who is going to stay with us for the hour.
Speaker 3: He is a veteran radio and TV broadcaster and an
Speaker 3: edutainer with expertise in astronomy space whether anything that happens
Speaker 3: in the sky, and he's also a podcaster for WABC
Speaker 3: radio dot com and a brand new official contribution to
Speaker 3: WABC in New York. Steve, it is great to talk
Speaker 3: with you, and it's even better to call you a colleague.
Speaker 4: Finally, well, Frank, good morning, and thank you so much
Speaker 4: for the kind comments, and to all the listeners out there,
Speaker 4: we say good morning. Just a privilege and honor, you know,
Speaker 4: obviously with the radio station that I grew up as
Speaker 4: a person living in New York and New Jersey has
Speaker 4: so many others, and just a little tribute if you
Speaker 4: don't mind. A good friend of mine, his name is
Speaker 4: Tony Recasino. He just sadly passed away. He's my age
Speaker 4: sixty six, and both of us lived in Hackensack, New Jersey.
Speaker 4: And what did we do. Frank would run down to
Speaker 4: the WABC antenna when we could get down that way
Speaker 4: in Lodi, New Jersey, and we'd actually fish in the
Speaker 4: little swamps down there. So, Tony, if you're listening to
Speaker 4: us in the afterlife, I just wanted to pass that
Speaker 4: on Frank, because it's an honor to be part of
Speaker 4: this radio station. Who would figure that one day I'd
Speaker 4: be staring there looking at the antenna and we're doing
Speaker 4: that that's wild. So it's a real.
Speaker 2: Honor that is wild. Indeed.
Speaker 3: All right, there's a lot that I want to go
Speaker 3: over with you, namely the fact that I think, for
Speaker 3: the first time in anyone's memory, there is going to
Speaker 3: be a big eclipse, a total lunar eclipse on Tuesday,
Speaker 3: which happens to be election day. Now there's got to
Speaker 3: be some sort of cosmic meaning about some upset election
Speaker 3: wins in this year.
Speaker 2: What can we look forward to with this eclipse on Tuesday.
Speaker 4: Well, it's interesting we'll start with the East coast, Ryan,
Speaker 4: because it's total lunar eclipse. This follows one that we
Speaker 4: just had back in May that was pretty much favored
Speaker 4: for the western part of the United States, and this
Speaker 4: one technically also is so for everybody listening in the
Speaker 4: Eastern time zone. I don't forget. We make the big
Speaker 4: time change for good portion of the United States, and
Speaker 4: then times change too as you're looking at this eclipse.
Speaker 4: So it's just brief synopsis here. It's a very early
Speaker 4: morning eclipse. There's a lot of technicalities on this, but
Speaker 4: I would just suggest to everybody on the East coast
Speaker 4: that if you're looking to see this eclipse, it's going
Speaker 4: to happen very early in the morning, just before sunrise,
Speaker 4: so the eclipse will actually begin the partial phases in
Speaker 4: Eastern time, Eastern Standard time four h nine am. That's
Speaker 4: when you'd have to be placed in a clear location,
Speaker 4: you know, not near buildings, the clearest view of the horizon.
Speaker 4: Totality is going to begin at five sixteen am Eastern
Speaker 4: Standard time. It just convert time zones across the country.
Speaker 4: The midi clipse of this particular event, which is the
Speaker 4: totality phase five point fifty nine am Eastern Standard time,
Speaker 4: and this total eclips will end at six forty one
Speaker 4: in the morning Eastern Standard time. Again. But what's interesting, Frank,
Speaker 4: there's eighty five minutes of totality, and what does that mean.
Speaker 4: It means that the moon, which will be just a
Speaker 4: few days before apage, meaning it's almost at its farthest
Speaker 4: point away, so it's a smaller disc moon that you'll
Speaker 4: see with the eye, and it gets more time inside
Speaker 4: that central shadow, so it transits through the Earth's deep
Speaker 4: shadow called the Umber, and it lasts for some eighty
Speaker 4: five minutes. But if you look at the entire thing
Speaker 4: from geopolitics or whatever, there has never been a total
Speaker 4: lunary clips on election day in US history. That's an
Speaker 4: interesting fact. So isn't that kind of auspicious? Here we
Speaker 4: go for people that of course are going to go vote,
Speaker 4: and we encourage that in person if they haven't done
Speaker 4: their part mailing things, we're going to be having this
Speaker 4: eclipse just before sunrise it takes place, and then that
Speaker 4: full day of the election. So the next time in history,
Speaker 4: according to those that do these deep predictions, when would
Speaker 4: be the next total lunary eclipse if the country exists
Speaker 4: or if we're out doing elections? I hope, So mark
Speaker 4: the date of November the eighth, twenty three ninety four.
Speaker 3: Three ninety four, so about three hundred and seventy two years.
Speaker 4: You're exactly right. And there's a magical number there that
Speaker 4: you just mentioned, because these these eclipses repeat in a
Speaker 4: cycle of about three hundred and seventy two years for
Speaker 4: it to happen on the same date. But this eclipse
Speaker 4: is part of something called a Sero cycle, and I
Speaker 4: don't want to get too deep into it because of
Speaker 4: other questions that I'm sure people have. It's called the
Speaker 4: Sero cycle number one thirty six and the last time
Speaker 4: we had an eclipse of this series. So ceiroses have
Speaker 4: a series of eclipses, and there's so many of them.
Speaker 4: The last one occurred back on October the twenty eighth
Speaker 4: of two thousand and four, and the next one of
Speaker 4: that seos cycle, not to confuse everyone, would occur on
Speaker 4: November the eighteenth of twenty forty. So this is a
Speaker 4: fascinating thing that's going to happen. And now, if you
Speaker 4: scratch your head and say, well, wait a minute, doctor sky,
Speaker 4: what's going to be the next total lunary eclipse that
Speaker 4: we can see in relativistics short time, in the short term,
Speaker 4: mark the date of March fourteenth, twenty twenty five. So
Speaker 4: that's the next big one. So if you miss this
Speaker 4: one weather conditions, you know a lot of times the
Speaker 4: weather doesn't cooperate, but if it does, it's going to
Speaker 4: be a big event out here in Arizona. Of course,
Speaker 4: we'll be doing things for local television and all the
Speaker 4: other things, plus a group of people that want to
Speaker 4: watch it, so get that coffee going and dress warmly
Speaker 4: in accordance with the weather. So it's pretty exciting.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, We're going to take questions throughout the hour for
Speaker 3: Steve Kate's aka Doctor Sky eight hundred and eighty four
Speaker 3: eight nine two two. That's eight hundred and eight four
Speaker 3: eight nine two two two. Steve, this is the first
Speaker 3: time I believe that. Yeah, no, I believe is the
Speaker 3: first time we've spoken that you are being heard in Alaska.
Speaker 3: We are are now on a great station KYR in Anchorage, Alaska.
Speaker 3: Anything you could tell folks about their Alaska sky viewing,
Speaker 3: because I have a hunch that there's some particularly interesting
Speaker 3: sites to see over there.
Speaker 4: Well, I envy them. I mean, welcome to the family,
Speaker 4: as you would say, Frank, And of course we all
Speaker 4: mean that the more stations that this particular radio show
Speaker 4: is heard, obviously it's great to get this message out
Speaker 4: on the other side of midnight, but to go right
Speaker 4: to it, those folks, I envy them in a way.
Speaker 4: Obviously the temperature we all know would be colder, but
Speaker 4: for the darkness that comes the shortening shortness of the
Speaker 4: days that are happening right now. This eclipse should be
Speaker 4: visible up to the you know, in the great state
Speaker 4: of Alaska. But it's interesting up there. Frank. One of
Speaker 4: the things that I think maybe we should do is
Speaker 4: team up with that radio station. And I'm serious about
Speaker 4: the best thing they have that we don't have is
Speaker 4: regular occurrences, as they're probably going, Yep, we get it
Speaker 4: pretty much all the time, the beautiful Aurora borealis. Can
Speaker 4: you imagine seeing that on a regular basis with all
Speaker 4: the sun activities, So Aurora activity is strong, the moon
Speaker 4: continues to get brighter. Obviously it'll be a little lower
Speaker 4: in the sky because of the higher latitude. But wow,
Speaker 4: that's a great place. And I've not been there. Have
Speaker 4: you ever met?
Speaker 3: No, my parents were there on an Alaska cruise or
Speaker 3: two and they've had nothing but great things to say.
Speaker 2: So it is. It is on my list.
Speaker 4: It is on my list.
Speaker 2: Would be great eight eight eight nine two too too.
Speaker 2: Let me say a little Bill in Huntington, Hello, Bill?
Speaker 5: Oh, how you going?
Speaker 4: Runny? Bill?
Speaker 6: All right?
Speaker 4: Now?
Speaker 5: When I was a child, I looked at pictures of
Speaker 5: nebula and galaxies and Life magazine, and the arian nebula
Speaker 5: was red, white and blue, and.
Speaker 6: The Ring Nebula was yellow and red, and the Andromeda
Speaker 6: galaxy was golden in the core, and then the spiral
Speaker 6: arms it was purple.
Speaker 5: And then my parents bought me a telescope, and the
Speaker 5: Orion nebula was white, and the Ring nebula was this
Speaker 5: faint smoke ring, and Andromeda was a fuzzy white oval.
Speaker 5: And I figured out that all of this was a
Speaker 5: figment of the color film they used. Yes, okay, and
Speaker 5: now we have these automated space telescopes.
Speaker 3: Are where we only have an hour here, right, I
Speaker 3: love it.
Speaker 5: Film, Okay, all right, the colors are totally false and
Speaker 5: they make the near infrared image brown and they superimpose them.
Speaker 5: All Okay, Now.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, i gotta take pity on the audience here.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna I'm gonna step in if you want to comment.
Speaker 4: Steve on Ed, I think Bill's gone through something. And
Speaker 4: here's the simple response i'd give from what I.
Speaker 2: Think diminishes your credibility right there.
Speaker 4: It was very interesting what he was talking about. The
Speaker 4: images that are coming through from these telescopes. They have
Speaker 4: these grandiose color images. They're long term exposures with different
Speaker 4: type of cameras, even a regular camera out in space,
Speaker 4: if you would expose it like we know from simple
Speaker 4: film days, the more color and resolution you're going to get.
Speaker 4: And he's right, when you look in a simple telescope.
Speaker 4: I've had people come up to me and say, hey,
Speaker 4: you know, that's nothing like I saw in Life magazine,
Speaker 4: like Bill was talking about. The reason is your eye
Speaker 4: doesn't have the perceptibility because the eye is seeing something
Speaker 4: in a different way and it doesn't have a time exposure.
Speaker 4: It's looking at it in real life. So the images
Speaker 4: you see in the telescope, as good as they are,
Speaker 4: are not going to have all these grandiose colors. It's
Speaker 4: going to be done by those big, long exposures from
Speaker 4: space telescopes or cameras. Even here on the Earth can
Speaker 4: get colored, all right.
Speaker 3: Well, a lot of folks have been talking about Elon
Speaker 3: Musk this week because of his purchase of Twitter. Some
Speaker 3: folks may forget that before he was running Twitter, he
Speaker 3: was involved in a little company called SpaceX and they
Speaker 3: had a big week themselves. SpaceX Falcon Heavy, the most
Speaker 3: powerful operational rocket in the world, finally launched out of
Speaker 3: Florida on Tuesday morning.
Speaker 2: Why is this such a big deal, Well, it's.
Speaker 4: Very interesting here, and not to knock NASA, but this
Speaker 4: came across, you know, talking to local people. We do
Speaker 4: a lot of outdoor programs with the Sky and a
Speaker 4: good percentage of younger adults and seniors come up to
Speaker 4: me and go, hey, how can Elon Musk just get
Speaker 4: these rockets off on schedule and has a pretty good
Speaker 4: success rate, And why can't NASA do it? Well? The
Speaker 4: answer to follow, but let's give him all the kudos
Speaker 4: that he deserves on their team. This, as you mentioned, correctly,
Speaker 4: the most powerful rocket to date, some five and a
Speaker 4: half million pounds of thrust. It gets off the ground
Speaker 4: with three cores basically the one left and right and
Speaker 4: a central core which has another secondary rocket up there
Speaker 4: too for the payload. So if you take these twenty
Speaker 4: seven Merlin engines right, this is what this is a
Speaker 4: powered bot. It's an incredible feet of technology to develop
Speaker 4: these Merlin engines. They each have about one hundred and
Speaker 4: ninety thousand pounds of thrust on them. They're using a
Speaker 4: combination of fuel I call it binary but that's not
Speaker 4: totally accurate, of liquid oxygen and a chilled RP one
Speaker 4: which in the simple world is called kerosene in a
Speaker 4: different derivative. So they launched this rocket. And here's the
Speaker 4: great thing. NASA didn't get the contract for launching some
Speaker 4: of the military secret satellites which basically on board here
Speaker 4: there's probably two. And what makes this mission even more
Speaker 4: interesting that it gets off on time almost like what
Speaker 4: just like clockwork, Like you imagine, this particular rocket has
Speaker 4: so much power that it's set two of these, you know,
Speaker 4: in quote secret payloads from the Space Force up to
Speaker 4: geosynchronous orbit. That's twenty two thousand miles up. So normally
Speaker 4: what these other rockets would do is launch them to
Speaker 4: a lower altitude where the spacecraft actually has to use
Speaker 4: its engines to boost itself up to the stationary geosynchronous
Speaker 4: Now this rocket pushes it all the way up there
Speaker 4: in one fell swoop, which is amazing, and you actually
Speaker 4: see the two side boosters do the impossible. Now, if
Speaker 4: I was watching television like you and everybody else forty
Speaker 4: years ago, and if we imagine we just watched Alan
Speaker 4: Sheppard go up in the little Redstone rocket back in
Speaker 4: sixty one, can we imagine if we actually saw that
Speaker 4: rocket that he launched up in do a soft landing,
Speaker 4: that would have just like been no, that can't happen,
Speaker 4: and it did not.
Speaker 3: Amazing it is it is so this SpaceX Falcon rocket,
Speaker 3: why was it delayed three years.
Speaker 4: Well, they had a lot of issues that they were
Speaker 4: trying to get It goes more into the politics of this,
Speaker 4: and they had some cond tricks that they had to
Speaker 4: get signed. But the good news is, and let me
Speaker 4: go back to the comparison, and I just wanted to
Speaker 4: give us a short answer if there's time. It's amazing
Speaker 4: and again we all love what NASA's doing. Look at
Speaker 4: the great history. But for some strange reason, and some
Speaker 4: people think it's not strange, they just have so many
Speaker 4: issues going on with this liquid hydrogen and the leaks
Speaker 4: and stuff like that. Their next agenda here, their likes
Speaker 4: launch agenda, is to do this and we wish them
Speaker 4: well on November the fourteenth. And as we speak right now,
Speaker 4: I don't have a confirmation of this. It's more than
Speaker 4: likely that this rocket, the Artemis Wan, is actually starting
Speaker 4: to roll out of the Vehicle assembly building to its
Speaker 4: long trek to get to the launch pad. They got
Speaker 4: to get this off the ground. But somehow, and I
Speaker 4: really can't figure it out. Does he have a smarter
Speaker 4: team of people? I don't know, But look at the
Speaker 4: great things that was their fiftieth space launch of this year,
Speaker 4: and it just seems like it never ends. In Frank,
Speaker 4: there's so many more of these so called military secret
Speaker 4: pipe payloads that they have contract for. And they're eventually
Speaker 4: going to launch the Europa Clipper, which is a spacecraft
Speaker 4: that's going to explore the Jovian Moon Europa to look
Speaker 4: for ocean underneath the surface a spacecraft, and the Psyche
Speaker 4: Metallic Asteroid mission is also slated to be launched on
Speaker 4: a Falcon Heavy. And we haven't seen nothing yet because
Speaker 4: he's even got a more powerful rocket that there's going
Speaker 4: to work on. But Artemis, God bless them for what
Speaker 4: they're doing. That'll have eight points something million pounds of thrust.
Speaker 4: Then that will take the you know, the prize of
Speaker 4: being the most powerful rocket in the Earth.
Speaker 3: We're going to continue with Steve Kate's aka Doctor Sky
Speaker 3: in just a minute. If you have questions about anything
Speaker 3: related to space, astronomy and so forth, now's the time,
Speaker 3: four open lines if you want to jump on board.
Speaker 3: Eight hundred eight four eight ninety two twenty two. That's
Speaker 3: eight hundred eight four eight nine two two two. This
Speaker 3: is the other side of Midnight straight ahead, the.
Speaker 1: Other side of Midnight with Frank Morano. It's the other
Speaker 1: side of Midnight with Frank Morano.
Speaker 7: MARANOZ let's be stoning, there's a girl use hot stonin,
Speaker 7: there's an.
Speaker 4: Let's go st.
Speaker 3: The Capris singing about a moon out tonight. Well, if
Speaker 3: you are wondering what is in the night sky, including
Speaker 3: the moon, that's worth looking at, you are tuned to
Speaker 3: the right radio station. My guest for the hour is
Speaker 3: Steve Kate's aka Doctor Sky. He is a WABC contributor
Speaker 3: and a podcaster at WABC radio dot com. He is
Speaker 3: a veteran radio and TV broadcaster, and he is what
Speaker 3: we call him edutainer who educates as he entertains, specifically
Speaker 3: as it relates to astronomy and space, but we're not
Speaker 3: limited to those areas. Steve, you obviously mentioned the eclipse
Speaker 3: that's going to take place on Tuesday. Between now and then,
Speaker 3: is there anything else in the night sky that people
Speaker 3: should be on the lookout for.
Speaker 4: Well, sure, Frank. As we move into November, this is
Speaker 4: fireball season and this is an interesting time of the year.
Speaker 4: What do I mean by that? This particular time of
Speaker 4: year we go through debris from what we call comet Ankie,
Speaker 4: one of the second actually the second comet that was
Speaker 4: discovered with as an orbital period. First one, of course,
Speaker 4: is Comet Halle, the seventy sixth year comet that moves
Speaker 4: around the Sun. So from now until maybe sometime around
Speaker 4: maybe the middle of November, and I know the moon
Speaker 4: is getting brighter for those that have patients, and that's
Speaker 4: what you need. Patients is a real virtue at this
Speaker 4: if you can stay outside just around dusk, look to
Speaker 4: the sky, maybe even toward the morning sky, look everywhere
Speaker 4: in the sky. You know, it's kind of hard to
Speaker 4: keep your eyes, you know, in one position because you
Speaker 4: may see some of these bright objects. We just had
Speaker 4: one here over Tucson, Arizona, that was brighter than the
Speaker 4: full moon. They debris from this, they think that is
Speaker 4: what the astronomers think, debris from this comet Anke that
Speaker 4: might have shattered many many millions of years ago. And
Speaker 4: believe me, folks, this is quite interesting. And frank you know,
Speaker 4: the darker locations are favored. But I've seen a number
Speaker 4: of these, so you never know what you're going to see.
Speaker 4: But for other regular things that are in the sky,
Speaker 4: and they're pretty exciting. This is planetary season. Also as
Speaker 4: the sun sets, if you look high in the south.
Speaker 4: In a clear sky, you'll see Saturn visible to the
Speaker 4: naked eye. Just scan to the left as you move
Speaker 4: toward that position. In the east. The brightest object now
Speaker 4: that sits in the night sky in the evening is Jupiter,
Speaker 4: and it's beautiful. It's bright. You can see it better
Speaker 4: in a telescope. Even binoculars show you some of the
Speaker 4: moons if you hold it steady. But Frank, Mars is
Speaker 4: now taking over as really this amazing object. Look into
Speaker 4: the northeast right around ten PM, so that rang looking
Speaker 4: object that you see is now less than fifty seven
Speaker 4: million miles from the Earth. It's getting closer for a
Speaker 4: close encounter that's going to take place right around December
Speaker 4: the seventh, and there's going to be an interesting event
Speaker 4: for some parts of the listening audience that has the
Speaker 4: planet Mars will be actually eclipsed by that full moon
Speaker 4: in December. That'll be an amazing thing to see. But
Speaker 4: when I look in the telescope now, and I'm describing
Speaker 4: the telescope, it's probably eight inch diameter telescope, meaning the
Speaker 4: mirror's eight inch diameter. That's pretty standard. I can look
Speaker 4: at Mars right now and see it almost full. I
Speaker 4: can see surface features on there, and I can see
Speaker 4: in the northern polar cap there's this blue haze that's
Speaker 4: over it because it's winter in the northern hemisphere now
Speaker 4: on Mars, and you can see that blue contrast. What
Speaker 4: is it? It's ice particles suspended in the air. So
Speaker 4: if you are there, be extremely cold, like one hundred
Speaker 4: and forty below zero, maybe some winds, but you can
Speaker 4: see this. But Mars is getting closer and it's an interesting,
Speaker 4: interesting planet to see. So those are some of the
Speaker 4: summary items of what we can see in November. And
Speaker 4: then another meteor shower called the leon on the morning
Speaker 4: of the nineteenth. That's amazing.
Speaker 3: Is that something you could see the naked eye or
Speaker 3: you should have binoculars or something for that.
Speaker 4: Well, for that it's interesting. Now I get in trouble
Speaker 4: when I talk about meteor showers because a lot of
Speaker 4: people will email me and say, hey, I was out
Speaker 4: there and you're telling me you can see meteors and
Speaker 4: they only saw two. Again, patience is a virtue, but
Speaker 4: you can see it with the naked eye. This is interesting.
Speaker 4: The leonids sometimes roar. Now every thirty three years you
Speaker 4: get an uptick, but you don't know what to expect.
Speaker 4: You know, it's like that box of chocolates. You never
Speaker 4: know what they're going to get. So when you look
Speaker 4: into the eastern sky for this, this starts around two
Speaker 4: am on the night of the eighteenth, and if you
Speaker 4: look to the east, that's where Leo will rise. The
Speaker 4: zodiac sign right in the head of Leo is where
Speaker 4: they come out. But Frank in nineteen sixty six, I
Speaker 4: wasn't here in Arizona, but I remember this from reading this.
Speaker 4: You know, over the last couple of decades people were
Speaker 4: sitting on the top of kit Peak, one of the
Speaker 4: big telescopes in southern Arizona, and the leonids weren't doing much.
Speaker 4: They were supposed to around five point thirty in the
Speaker 4: morn on the sixteenth of November in nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 4: This is not made up. This is bizarre. I wish
Speaker 4: I was there. You wish everybody would wish. There were
Speaker 4: over five hundred thousand meteors streaming out of the sky
Speaker 4: in this big, holacious storm, as if you were driving
Speaker 4: with bright headlights through a snowstorm. Now can you imagine
Speaker 4: that much debris the whole sky? It looked as if
Speaker 4: something just absolutely from a dreamscape. See in all these
Speaker 4: meteors five hundred thousand an hour. It lasted for well,
Speaker 4: from that time around five point thirty till sunrise, about
Speaker 4: forty five minutes. Imagine seeing that. So you never know
Speaker 4: what you get with the leonits. They were like one
Speaker 4: of the more reliable showers. They're faint, sometimes faint meteors,
Speaker 4: sometimes bright, and they're very fast.
Speaker 3: No, that's well, so see it with the naked eye
Speaker 3: at your own peril.
Speaker 2: Right, we'll see dark sky.
Speaker 4: Right, But patients, patience is the thing because then I
Speaker 4: want to get in untrouble or out of trouble because
Speaker 4: when I always tell people the truth. You know, obviously
Speaker 4: a lot of these things, like when Bill was talking
Speaker 4: about you know, he was making sense. When you look
Speaker 4: in the telescope, you see blue and white and you
Speaker 4: don't see color because it's something that your eye can't
Speaker 4: perceive because those are cameras doing that. But Frank, there's
Speaker 4: a whole lot of things people can do, even city dwellers,
Speaker 4: And that's what we appeal to. You do astronomy right
Speaker 4: from your own backyard.
Speaker 3: And now that's what's so great about it. Eight hundred
Speaker 3: and eight four eight nine two two two. Rose is
Speaker 3: in New Jersey. Rose, you're on with Steve Kats.
Speaker 8: Yes, good morning, and thank you for taking my call.
Speaker 4: Sure, good morning, Rose.
Speaker 8: Oh it's great, great talking to you. I've taken I've
Speaker 8: taken a lot of classes in college on astronomy. I
Speaker 8: just loved it. And can you explain if the universe
Speaker 8: is expanding or contracting? Does that even apply today? And
Speaker 8: also if we just send a rocket and if it
Speaker 8: just keeps going and going and going, what what happens?
Speaker 4: Very answered, Let's take the first one, Rose, And they're
Speaker 4: great questions. As we all love the study of the
Speaker 4: sky in astronomy, as this universe seems to be expanding,
Speaker 4: we know that from this big explosion sometimes incorrectly referred
Speaker 4: to as the Big Bang. I like to call it
Speaker 4: the Big Expansion because we weren't around here to see
Speaker 4: something explode. Obviously, it was way before the Earth was forming.
Speaker 4: But what most people feel in the world of astronomy
Speaker 4: and quantum physics today, the big conundrum, and I talk
Speaker 4: about it a lot, is that the farther these objects
Speaker 4: are away, you would imagine that they would be more
Speaker 4: entropy or disorder. What's happening is quite the opposite. Instead
Speaker 4: of the universe slowing down, what we're seeing is that
Speaker 4: it's actually expanding and going faster. In other words, it's acceleration,
Speaker 4: and it's something that we think, well, we know what
Speaker 4: we call it is dark energy, but nobody really quite
Speaker 4: understands what would happen to that. And not to belaguer
Speaker 4: this with the details too much. This whole thing about
Speaker 4: entropy is interesting. What is it. It's a system's measure
Speaker 4: of thermal energy that is unavailable for doing useful works.
Speaker 4: In simple terms, entropy is disorder. So it looks like
Speaker 4: the universe is not going to that entropy level as
Speaker 4: we see something pushing it faster. But if you took
Speaker 4: a rocket, I think that was your second part or
Speaker 4: second question, is what would happen? What if it continued
Speaker 4: out into space. Since there's no gravity forces in deep space,
Speaker 4: the object would considerably. It would just continue, that is,
Speaker 4: excuse me, continue to move through space at whatever relative
Speaker 4: speed it was, unless there was a gravity force exerted
Speaker 4: on it. Let's say it ran out of power. It
Speaker 4: would just continue to move through space because there's no
Speaker 4: resistive force in there, and that would be quite interesting
Speaker 4: for anybody on board, because there's no well, how are
Speaker 4: you going to break something or slow it down? It
Speaker 4: would just continue to go if no exertion of gravity
Speaker 4: was near it or around it. Interesting stuff.
Speaker 3: Thank you Rose eight eight four eight nine two to
Speaker 3: two to two. Pete is in Wappinger's Falls.
Speaker 2: Hello Pete, Hey.
Speaker 4: Got this guy? Good morning.
Speaker 9: I had good morning. I had a question. Are there
Speaker 9: any space police? Like what stops one of these mega
Speaker 9: billionaires from buying an island, making it his own country,
Speaker 9: shilding a rocket, sending it up there and hitting one
Speaker 9: of our main satellites. Who controls that? Or because nobody
Speaker 9: owns the space.
Speaker 4: Well there's a whole thing called space law. And I
Speaker 4: know that sounded funny when I mentioned about twenty years
Speaker 4: ago to people there was something called astrobiology. Well, they said, well,
Speaker 4: what's that. Well, the thing you're talking about is you're
Speaker 4: absolutely right. In the United States, the FAA is going
Speaker 4: to be the people that you're going to have to
Speaker 4: work with, at least to even do anything, go through
Speaker 4: this whole procedural process. Elon Musk had to do that
Speaker 4: when he started to launch rockets from Texas in Boca Chica,
Speaker 4: but you're right, or.
Speaker 9: In his country, But is there anybody had We don't
Speaker 9: have a star fleet, you.
Speaker 2: Know, well we watch Space Force, right, Steve.
Speaker 4: Well, we have a space force. But no to go
Speaker 4: on to your question, Pete, no to answer it. Now,
Speaker 4: this is interesting. I'm just trying to say this that
Speaker 4: in others, Let's say I wanted to a tiny little
Speaker 4: country somewhere and they didn't have any real sophisticated you know,
Speaker 4: military or governance, you know, wherever that would be. Let's
Speaker 4: just say I choose to do this in Antarctica. Whereas
Speaker 4: who's controlling Antarctica? I mean, it's supposed to be a free,
Speaker 4: a neutral zone where you're not going to have nuclear
Speaker 4: weapons and military bass. But if I started to launch rockets,
Speaker 4: it's some maybe some nation might give me a hard time.
Speaker 4: But the point is you could probably launch whatever you wanted.
Speaker 4: And the problem is even now with the big nations.
Speaker 4: Right now we're talking about Russia, you know, not the
Speaker 4: typeiously they're looking to even have they they have the capability,
Speaker 4: and they've even warned us that if we do something
Speaker 4: in the Ukraine that they don't like or you know,
Speaker 4: mess with something. I don't know the details that theoretically
Speaker 4: they could shoot down some of our satellites, and so
Speaker 4: could Shina. But the truth of the matter is, I'm
Speaker 4: sure we have the equal force too, because a long
Speaker 4: time ago, here's here's the final part of this. I
Speaker 4: think you'd appreciate this peek. We developed from the F
Speaker 4: fifteen something a long time ago called an asat. It's
Speaker 4: a missile that actually can go on let's say an
Speaker 4: F fifteen, and an F fifteen can do this time
Speaker 4: to climb thing which it can shoot those big afterburners
Speaker 4: up on the twin engine F fifteen, and it could
Speaker 4: actually go so high so fast it could launch that
Speaker 4: missile from the aircraft. We could shoot a satellite down.
Speaker 4: So they're not the only people that have this capability.
Speaker 4: But right, paint, why can't we all just get along?
Speaker 4: I guess is really the bottom line in the whole
Speaker 4: thing exactly pretty amazing.
Speaker 3: Eight nine two two. J J is in Cincinnati.
Speaker 10: Hello J, Hey, great show Doctor Sky.
Speaker 4: Hey J. How are you fine?
Speaker 10: I was kind of a rock count, amateur rock count.
Speaker 10: As kids, we used to hunt fossils and creek beds.
Speaker 10: Did you ever find any fossil proof? You know, extra
Speaker 10: truss like on meteorites or the moon rocks for instance,
Speaker 10: of ancient life elsewhere.
Speaker 4: No, not that I know of. And there's something very
Speaker 4: interesting that you bring up here, because this is interesting, Jay.
Speaker 4: There was a meteor or a meteoroid whatever you want
Speaker 4: to call it, a chunk of asteroid actually came down somewhere,
Speaker 4: and I don't know the exact location. I'm pretty much
Speaker 4: a guesser here, but I'm honest it was somewhere down, say,
Speaker 4: like in off of Indonesia, I guess. And the orbital
Speaker 4: calculations on that indicated that it might have been a
Speaker 4: extrasolar type of object. In other words, it came from
Speaker 4: another star system. So the search quietly has been on
Speaker 4: for that, and maybe that if they could ever really
Speaker 4: track it or find it, but good luck, it's probably
Speaker 4: and I'm guessing maybe what thousands of feet of water
Speaker 4: And unless you have the old Howard used Glomar explorer
Speaker 4: that can actually go in the ocean and dig up
Speaker 4: like Russian submarines and stuff, that would be difficult. But no,
Speaker 4: there's never been anything truly identified as being you know,
Speaker 4: other than standard biology that we see, like the moon
Speaker 4: rocks didn't show us that there's another species, you know,
Speaker 4: like a dinosaur egg of some kind of life or
Speaker 4: some crazy thing like that. So now maybe those extrasolar asteroids,
Speaker 4: if we find one, maybe we'll get some more positives
Speaker 4: on it.
Speaker 2: Thank you Jay. You know, Steve, it strikes me.
Speaker 3: We spent a lot of time talking about the objects
Speaker 3: that come from space to this Earth, and in our
Speaker 3: previous conversations we've spent a lot of time talking about
Speaker 3: space junk, which are essentially byproducts of things that we've
Speaker 3: sent into space. There's got to be a lot of
Speaker 3: concern about long term space pollution or contamination. What is
Speaker 3: the most contaminated thing we've ever sent into space?
Speaker 4: Well, this is kind of funny and it's an interesting story.
Speaker 4: And I read this, believe it or not, just about
Speaker 4: two weeks ago, and it has to do with the
Speaker 4: Elon Musk And I can't prove this, but sometimes I've
Speaker 4: looked at it a couple of sources and it said, yes,
Speaker 4: so here we go. We never intentionally sent something to
Speaker 4: the Moon like a virus like the COVID virus. God
Speaker 4: help us. What they found out was when they launched
Speaker 4: Elon Musk's first Falcon heavy back on February the sixth
Speaker 4: of twenty eighteen. What was the payload. It was his
Speaker 4: Tesla roadster, the car, and in there they put that
Speaker 4: cool little dummy, the Starman in there, and sooner or later,
Speaker 4: it was actually later. They showed images of that whole
Speaker 4: thing as it came out of the capsule, you know,
Speaker 4: the upper stage, and it was floating around the Earth
Speaker 4: and you see these pictures and now it's going on
Speaker 4: in orbit that takes it around by Mars. But they're
Speaker 4: saying that that car might be still the most contaminated
Speaker 4: object because what that car was driven on the freeways
Speaker 4: of Los Angeles. I don't know how much they debunked that,
Speaker 4: but what would you have to do to make it
Speaker 4: because you see in these rooms like in JPL, you
Speaker 4: see all these people in these white suits with masks
Speaker 4: and you know, hoods on and hats to decontaminate any
Speaker 4: spacecraft because you don't want to pollute space with microbes
Speaker 4: from the Earth. So that might still be according to some,
Speaker 4: but it's not destined to land on anything. That's the
Speaker 4: interesting part. So the Tesla roads there goes into history.
Speaker 4: But you know, I would have kept the car in
Speaker 4: the ground. I don't know. I'd like that car, wouldn't
Speaker 4: you say?
Speaker 11: Same?
Speaker 4: Here?
Speaker 3: Absolutely? Four eight nine two two. David is in New Jersey.
Speaker 2: Hello David, Hi, Good morning doctor, Good morning David.
Speaker 11: I'm doing well.
Speaker 4: How are you good? Sir?
Speaker 11: So, if there's a assuming you have a spaceship with
Speaker 11: a near limitless fuel supply, let's say a nuclear supply,
Speaker 11: going through outer space, and it continues to provide thrust,
Speaker 11: well that at what point does that spaceship reach terminal
Speaker 11: velocity or is there terminal velocity since since there's no
Speaker 11: there's no gravity pulling it anywhere.
Speaker 4: Well, again, as I mentioned before, when Rose Caledon was
Speaker 4: talking about what happens when you just have a spacecraft
Speaker 4: going out into space. In this particular case, if you're
Speaker 4: talking about deep space, we're up down, sideways, left and right.
Speaker 4: It's not like north, southeast or west. If you had
Speaker 4: velocity on a spacecraft, it would continue to go through
Speaker 4: space and just continue to move unless it was perturbed
Speaker 4: by another gravity source. Let's say it came closer to
Speaker 4: a planet. But this is interesting because I don't know
Speaker 4: if you heard this originally. I know, Frank, you had
Speaker 4: your previous hour, you had somebody talking about time travel.
Speaker 4: And this is bizarre because if we get into the
Speaker 4: thing of well would this thing get close to the
Speaker 4: speed of light or move out? Got to remember what's
Speaker 4: the speed. It's relative to the expansion of the universe
Speaker 4: out there, so the mega speed of that is also
Speaker 4: related to the gigantic expansion of the universe. But this
Speaker 4: whole time travel thing, it's very interesting. It simply violates
Speaker 4: the second law of thermodynamics because randomness must always continue on.
Speaker 4: In other words, you how do I say this? In
Speaker 4: a simple way? Time can only move in one direction.
Speaker 4: It's called the arrow of time. And this gets very
Speaker 4: confusing because a lot of people think, well, we could
Speaker 4: go back in time. That's the most problematic thing. Why,
Speaker 4: I don't know. But the arrow of time simply goes
Speaker 4: in one direction. It stated that it violates time travel,
Speaker 4: simply violates the second law of thermodynamics. So this particular
Speaker 4: randomness must always increase. So it's this entropy thing about disorder.
Speaker 4: And I think that's probably deep enough for what for
Speaker 4: this time of the morning. Oh yeah, that's And I'll
Speaker 4: be honest, I don't know. I mean, you know, to
Speaker 4: everybody calling hey, if I don't know something. I'm just
Speaker 4: going to be straight up here. You know, it's the
Speaker 4: best way to have a good night's sleep after you
Speaker 4: do a show, when you're honest right.
Speaker 3: Exactly, I'm going to try that one one day. If
Speaker 3: we've heard a lot about the NASA Artemis project, what
Speaker 3: is the latest with the Artemis project? How soon are
Speaker 3: we going to see some concrete results from Artemis?
Speaker 4: Well, again, kudos to all the engineers and scientists that
Speaker 4: are working on this project. It's going to be the
Speaker 4: most powerful rocket. As I mentioned before, I can't confirm this.
Speaker 4: Maybe from your computer you can who I during the break,
Speaker 4: but I've been told that it's supposed to be moved
Speaker 4: out as early as this morning. It's it's on its tractor,
Speaker 4: you know, the big mobile launching right, I mean the
Speaker 4: mobile tractor that moves it out, not the launcher to
Speaker 4: the launch pad. But then the latest date on this
Speaker 4: or the most you know, reliable date so far as
Speaker 4: they're shooting for about in November, the fourteenth launch date.
Speaker 4: Now I've heard some people say it could be as
Speaker 4: early as the twelfth. But let's help this time that
Speaker 4: they get this baby up into space, because not only
Speaker 4: would be the most powerful rocket, because what you're trying
Speaker 4: to do here is you need to have the heavy
Speaker 4: lift rockets get payloads to space. And that's why with
Speaker 4: Elon Musk gotcha, he has the ability, Frank, to get
Speaker 4: heavy payloads to lower th orbit, like up to one
Speaker 4: hundred and forty pounds. But with this particular artemis you
Speaker 4: can obviously start building the Gateway space station that'll go
Speaker 4: around the Moon and so many other things. So the
Speaker 4: simple answer is between November twelfth and fourteenth should be
Speaker 4: the next launch date, and we give them, you know,
Speaker 4: the greatest success. We pray for the greatest success for
Speaker 4: the rocket to go.
Speaker 2: Joe is in Hell's kitchen. Hello Joe.
Speaker 12: Okay, Frank, doctor Sky, it's a aut speak to you,
Speaker 12: heard you many times before. It's great to be a
Speaker 12: little false about this one question I have. I'm sure
Speaker 12: there's one question. I'm sure you've been asked about, and
Speaker 12: it's been on my mind since I've never thought about.
Speaker 12: You know, we'll call you out before all call sake
Speaker 12: and everything else of that space itself. I mean, looking
Speaker 12: at how far it goes back through all the galaxies
Speaker 12: and this and that, you think where they're going to
Speaker 12: find out where I mean it actually starts. I mean
Speaker 12: to point that where you can't go any further, like
Speaker 12: this is the distinct line going across the atmosphere. It's
Speaker 12: like you can't go any beyond that.
Speaker 4: Is that?
Speaker 12: Or think he just keeps on going to the point
Speaker 12: that we'll never know how far space actually goes.
Speaker 4: No, you ask him mostly and think, Frank, if this
Speaker 4: was the question of the of the hour, I think
Speaker 4: this would be the one doubt. No, Seriously, I don't know,
Speaker 4: but I can just tell you from my own knowledge
Speaker 4: and research that about ninety four billion light years is
Speaker 4: the expansion edge of the universe right now. That's what
Speaker 4: they think. But the truth is, I don't think it's
Speaker 4: ever going to have a definitive end because if space
Speaker 4: and time it's all, it's all combined. In other words,
Speaker 4: it's a limitless expansion. It's going to continue on, we believe, forever.
Speaker 4: And the other theory, the dark theory, is is that
Speaker 4: there'll be something which slows the universe down and that
Speaker 4: will collapse again into its own original form. But no,
Speaker 4: the simple answer is I don't think there is an end,
Speaker 4: and I don't think we'll ever know the end, and
Speaker 4: it just continues to expanse because remember, expand, everything that
Speaker 4: we are, you me, everything in this room, everything in
Speaker 4: your studio, everything and everybody's sitting in front of is
Speaker 4: all star stuff from that original expansion thirteen point seven
Speaker 4: seven billion years ago. Imagine seeing that. But that's mind
Speaker 4: boggling just to think about. Here.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Joe eight four eight nine two two two.
Speaker 3: There's been a ton of Mars news in the last
Speaker 3: couple of days. Story about Mars quakes, hinting that the
Speaker 3: planet might be volcanically active, a story that they are
Speaker 3: these NASA spotting pimples on Mars, a story about that
Speaker 3: the insight Mars lander may just have weeks left, and
Speaker 3: even some people saying that scientists unveiling further proof.
Speaker 2: Of salt water on Mars.
Speaker 3: What is the latest with Mars and is it true
Speaker 3: that Mars is actually coming closer to our planet?
Speaker 4: Well, it is coming closer to us, as I mentioned before,
Speaker 4: and as I call it, the live sky view, what
Speaker 4: people can actually see, because I think there's nothing worse
Speaker 4: than just talking about things that people can't see. So Mars,
Speaker 4: when you look in the northeast sky or that's I'm
Speaker 4: saying around ten pm. Now it's high in your sky
Speaker 4: as you're listening across this great country, you can see it.
Speaker 4: It's a red rad object. But let's go back to Mars.
Speaker 4: What's happening. Spacecraft Perseverance still doing great research, actually drilling
Speaker 4: cores into the surface, into rocks, and it's actually saving
Speaker 4: these in little tubes. And what it's going to be
Speaker 4: doing for it needs to find a flat area they
Speaker 4: haven't determined. Well, they know the name of it, but
Speaker 4: they haven't gotten there yet. It's going to discharge these
Speaker 4: little tubes as time goes on, and all that is
Speaker 4: going to be for another lander that they're hoping to
Speaker 4: have go up in the next couple of years, which
Speaker 4: will actually retrieve these little cylinders I call them glass
Speaker 4: test tubes and bring them back to the Earth so
Speaker 4: we can actually see this. But you're right, they had
Speaker 4: a Mars quake of about four something on the Richter
Speaker 4: scale the other day. That's kind of unusual for Mars
Speaker 4: because Mars doesn't have plate tectonics like the Earth does,
Speaker 4: so you would imagine that this is a whole different
Speaker 4: type of mechanism that's causing it. We don't know, but
Speaker 4: what we were talking about with John Katzimititious the other day.
Speaker 4: He asked me an interesting question about the Mars moons,
Speaker 4: like Phobos and Mars has the two tiny little moons,
Speaker 4: And believe me, I'm going to go off into the
Speaker 4: sci fi realm here because they're the strangest little objects.
Speaker 4: Little Phobos and Demos are named after the horses, the
Speaker 4: horse that, I should say, or the horses that drove
Speaker 4: or pulled the chariot that Areas or Mars you went
Speaker 4: into battle with. They're called panic and fear. But what's
Speaker 4: strange about little Phobos too is that it looks like
Speaker 4: it was a captured satellite from something, or even some
Speaker 4: speculate maybe an alien type artifact. Who knows why, because
Speaker 4: eventually those moons will cascade and crash into the planet.
Speaker 4: But here's a weird story. Cliver's Travels was written by
Speaker 4: Jonathan Swift, and in the book, I remember reading it
Speaker 4: in school, like you know, in high school, we had
Speaker 4: to read it. The Liliputians were the little people that
Speaker 4: he came upon, and they actually wrote about in their book.
Speaker 4: And this is what Jonathan Swift wrote about one hundred
Speaker 4: and fifty years before the Mars moons were discovered. He
Speaker 4: got the exact size, the exact shapes, the exact distances
Speaker 4: from Mars. And we didn't discover the Martian moons until
Speaker 4: eighteen seventy seven at the Naval Observatory where the Vice
Speaker 4: president lives. Wow, a guy named aesof Hall actually discovered
Speaker 4: those in a telescope. So isn't that the strangest thing.
Speaker 2: Maybe Jonathan Swift was a time traveler.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there you go, my friend. It's always great to speculate.
Speaker 4: But isn't that one of the most bizarre stories?
Speaker 2: That is wild?
Speaker 4: Those two moons are very unusual. They're very strange.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, that's.
Speaker 3: What eight hundred and eight four eight nine two two two.
Speaker 3: We're gonna continue with Steve.
Speaker 2: Kate's aka Doctor Sky straight.
Speaker 1: Ahead, the Other side of Midnight, Midnight, Midnight. It's Other
Speaker 1: side of Midnight with Frank Morano.
Speaker 7: Welcome to her.
Speaker 1: Third Rock from the Sun.
Speaker 2: She walks into Smookies one hit.
Speaker 1: Out of time, like a broken field runner, slip in
Speaker 1: through good line.
Speaker 4: He likes the way she.
Speaker 5: Looks, so he calls a little wife, say don't wait
Speaker 5: up for me, I'll be working lives tonight.
Speaker 2: Why thinks up the phone, burst into.
Speaker 13: Tears and calls her sister rough and cries getting it
Speaker 13: over here.
Speaker 2: This is the other side of midnight.
Speaker 3: I'm Frank Moretto, very please to be joined for the
Speaker 3: hour by Steve Kate's aka Doctor Sky. Will squeeze in
Speaker 3: as many of your questions as we can in the
Speaker 3: next few minutes. Eight hundred and eight four eight nine
Speaker 3: to two two two. That's eight hundred and eight four
Speaker 3: eight ninety two twenty two. Uh, Steve, guys, I believe
Speaker 3: you know. I am a fan of Star Trek and
Speaker 3: you hear all sorts of news from time to time
Speaker 3: in the world of Star Trek about gamma rays. What
Speaker 3: exactly is a gamma ray?
Speaker 6: Uh?
Speaker 3: That's real as opposed to being fictional? And what what
Speaker 3: are some of the more noteworthy gamma ray bursts that
Speaker 3: have been detected?
Speaker 4: Well, this is highly charged particles from space. It's like
Speaker 4: atomic nuclei that are like smashing into each other with
Speaker 4: these great power. You know, if you took a look
Speaker 4: at this in the ultraviolet, you'd see more of this
Speaker 4: that part of the spectrum. It's very very powerful energies.
Speaker 4: We really don't know that. As astronomers, we're the source
Speaker 4: of these gamma bursters are from. In other words, the
Speaker 4: simplest explanation might be this, when the star collapses, it
Speaker 4: can become a black hole. Certain types of stars, when
Speaker 4: other stars collapse, they can become neutron stars. I'll take
Speaker 4: the neutron star as a candidate. Imagine this. A neutron
Speaker 4: star would be about six miles in diameter. I'll repeat it,
Speaker 4: six miles in diameter. The magnetic field around that would
Speaker 4: be so disruptive if the Earth. Now this is ridiculous,
Speaker 4: but here we go sci fi while wise, if you
Speaker 4: could move the Earth next to the six mile neutron star,
Speaker 4: it would collapse the Earth to a sphere of one
Speaker 4: thousand feet in diameter one thousand feet How would it
Speaker 4: do that? The power of this magnetic field is so great.
Speaker 4: If we had one of these gamma ray bursters, let's
Speaker 4: say out by the planet Pluto or the dwarf planet, now,
Speaker 4: it would strip off all the magnetic stripes off of
Speaker 4: every single credit cards you have. Maybe that's good or bad,
Speaker 4: depending if you use it too much. But the reality
Speaker 4: is these energy fields that are coming off of these stars.
Speaker 4: One burst that happened in October was the singular most
Speaker 4: powerful blast of energy from the universe ever detected, and
Speaker 4: that is off the charts, and it goes off into
Speaker 4: sci fi. But I wanted to mention something briefly you
Speaker 4: mentioned at the top of the program whose story as
Speaker 4: you introduced my favorite movie too, Forbidden Planet, and this
Speaker 4: goes back to nineteen fifty six, my year of birth.
Speaker 4: But what's so amazing, Frank, I had a long time
Speaker 4: ago an interview with both Leslie Nielsen and the beautiful
Speaker 4: Anne France. Oh, I'll never forget this. I'll never forget this.
Speaker 4: And I couldn't stop laughing when I had this interview
Speaker 4: with Leslie because actually here's how I met him really quick.
Speaker 4: I was shopping at a Costco here in Phoenix about
Speaker 4: twenty some years ago, and I literally came around the
Speaker 4: corner rushing to get out of the store, and I
Speaker 4: hit my cart into another person's cart, and I said,
Speaker 4: excuse me. And I looked up and guess who it was?
Speaker 4: Leslie Nielsen.
Speaker 2: Leslie Nielsen's shot to Costco.
Speaker 4: See, well he did. He's passed on to the infant.
Speaker 4: But I said to him, you know, I'm fascinated, I say,
Speaker 4: would you ever do it like you know, an opportunity.
Speaker 4: Could we ever talk? And he's like yes. So when
Speaker 4: I had him on the phone, the producer for the show,
Speaker 4: and I couldn't stop laughing because I keep thinking of
Speaker 4: Frank Drebin and he was talking like Frank Drebin from
Speaker 4: you know, Airplane and all that. But the serious note
Speaker 4: An francis, Wow, what a beautiful person, what a wonderful woman.
Speaker 4: And I caught her in an interview when she was rushing,
Speaker 4: but she spent about forty five minutes with me talking
Speaker 4: about her role as Altera Morbius. You know, I never
Speaker 4: obviously met Walter Pidgeon or talked to him. He passed
Speaker 4: on a long time ago as doctor Edward Morbius. But
Speaker 4: that was a great time in my life. But the
Speaker 4: thing is, I just love that movie so same. Absolutely
Speaker 4: it's even the classic today.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 3: Hey, before I let you go, I can't avoid asking
Speaker 3: you about the news this week that scientists have discovered
Speaker 3: a planet killer asteroid nearly a mile long within the
Speaker 3: orbits of Earth and Venus. Now, I know we talked
Speaker 3: about the Dark Project and NASA claims to be pretty
Speaker 3: practiced at diverting these asteroids by now, But would you
Speaker 3: be urging people to get their.
Speaker 4: Affairs in order, I would say you probably have to
Speaker 4: not really worry too much right now. But here here's
Speaker 4: the little science truth on this. You're right, they discovered
Speaker 4: something different. But this is something where I've always said this,
Speaker 4: and I'm not the leader of this, I'm always repeating
Speaker 4: what the other scientists say, watch the skies in the
Speaker 4: area of what asteroids come from behind the sun. In
Speaker 4: other words, if you look in a bright sunny day,
Speaker 4: don't stare at the sun. But these are asteroids that
Speaker 4: come into our field in our orbital plane from the
Speaker 4: direction of the Sun. And this happens to be one
Speaker 4: of those objects. It's unbelievable, and that you know, with
Speaker 4: all the great science and all the calculations, and they
Speaker 4: have it pretty good down there at JPL where they
Speaker 4: track all these But the interesting thing, Frank, is that's
Speaker 4: kind of that's the kind of object that you want
Speaker 4: to watch very carefully because it's coming in in an
Speaker 4: area where it's surprising you. And if it's going to
Speaker 4: come and hit the air, at least you want to
Speaker 4: give us at least some kind of warning. Because even
Speaker 4: this little dart project, it's moved a tiny little asteroid
Speaker 4: only five hundred and twenty feet in diameter. A nudge,
Speaker 4: we don't have anything yet, not to scare people that
Speaker 4: would push that baby completely away from the Earth. That's
Speaker 4: what we got to keep watching absolutely.
Speaker 3: Eight four, eight ninety two, Tony in Clifton has been
Speaker 3: patiently holding Hello Tony.
Speaker 14: Hi, you know I good morning. I just love the
Speaker 14: whole concept of all our astronauts who really have made
Speaker 14: space travel be part of our lives and we've never
Speaker 14: even you know, gone up into space. And one of
Speaker 14: my favorite is John Glenn, who later became a senator.
Speaker 14: You know, as you look at all the astronauts from
Speaker 14: your point of view, who would be your favorite astronaut?
Speaker 14: And you know that did the most from the space
Speaker 14: program and took us sort of further than any other.
Speaker 14: Do you have a favorite?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I love your question, Tony. And also going back
Speaker 4: to John Glenn, I had a short interview with him
Speaker 4: a long time for Space Day and reading about his biography,
Speaker 4: I mean, what a great American, what a great person.
Speaker 4: But here's the other one that I had some time
Speaker 4: to at least spend time with or talk with. I
Speaker 4: love the stories that I heard from Wally Shira, I mean,
Speaker 4: other than the tang commercials that he did, But him
Speaker 4: and Walter Cronkite were obviously very close to in the
Speaker 4: early part of the space program. But those two astronauts,
Speaker 4: to me, they epitomized the whole thing about sacrifice, dedication
Speaker 4: to country, and their stories, I hope were told by
Speaker 4: many many people and children learn that these great Americans
Speaker 4: helped us move on to the stars, and the story
Speaker 4: is just beginning.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Tony.
Speaker 3: I'm a fan of buzz Aldrin, not only for his
Speaker 3: accomplishments in space, but because he's He's such a character.
Speaker 2: I love that he doesn't hold his tongue about anything.
Speaker 3: I love he's very vocal about going to Mars now,
Speaker 3: and I love that, you know. I think before it's
Speaker 3: all said and done, he'll have been a great pioneer
Speaker 3: in terms of lunar travel and a great advocate in
Speaker 3: terms of Martian exploration. In Martian Truda eight four eight
Speaker 3: nine two two. Chris is on Staten Island, Hell.
Speaker 4: Chris, Yeah, A quick question.
Speaker 9: I guess this is related to the global warming discussion.
Speaker 9: Is it true that the surface of Venus is heating up?
Speaker 4: Well, Chris the surface of Venus is pretty much a
Speaker 4: constant temperature. It's a horrible temperature, you know. That's why
Speaker 4: we're talking about that with some other folks. The service
Speaker 4: temperature excuse me as well over nine hundred degrees fahrenheit
Speaker 4: on a regular basis, So even spacecraft can't continue to
Speaker 4: you know, survive there. The pressures are like taking that
Speaker 4: spacecraft down to say, three thousand feet in the ocean
Speaker 4: the depth pressure, which none of them really survived. So
Speaker 4: it's not necessarily heating up anymore. It's just that the
Speaker 4: biggest question in science with Venus is what happened to Venus?
Speaker 4: Because it turns backwards on its orbit. In other words,
Speaker 4: when it goes around the Sun, it's going around like
Speaker 4: the regular planets, but it's rotating backwards. So if you're
Speaker 4: on Venus, God help us with the nine hundred degrees
Speaker 4: we needed biggest best to suit. The sun would rise
Speaker 4: in the west and its day is longer than its year.
Speaker 4: So imagine that baking sun through that sulfuric acid type atmosphere.
Speaker 4: Not a place that I think any all three of
Speaker 4: us want to go and anybody listening.
Speaker 2: Thank you. Chris Mike in New Hyde Park very quickly.
Speaker 13: Mike, doctor Sky, do you think there's any potential that
Speaker 13: the universe is not merely expanding but perhaps growing, expansion
Speaker 13: being and obvious characteristic of growth.
Speaker 4: I would say this from what we know and what
Speaker 4: I do in my interviews with other people. I don't
Speaker 4: have a book out on this, and I'm certainly always
Speaker 4: honest with the audience To answer your question, I think
Speaker 4: the universe has continued to expand, and we have to
Speaker 4: figure out what the heck the nature of this dark
Speaker 4: energy is, because it's continuing to move everything out faster
Speaker 4: when you would imagine it's to slow down. Frank, the
Speaker 4: excitement's just beginning.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 3: People can hear more from doctor Sky at WABC radio
Speaker 3: dot com, and you can also read the doctor Sky
Speaker 3: blog at kta ar dot com.
Speaker 2: Steve, it's always a treat.
Speaker 4: Thank you, my pleasure. Look forward to our next encounter.
Speaker 2: Same here.
Speaker 3: In the words of the great Casey Kasem, keep reaching
Speaker 2: For the stars while you keep your feet on the ground.