Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: Imagine taking one hundred and fifty earths.
Speaker 3: That is a staggering amount of material.
Speaker 2: Right, Just picture every single ocean, every mountain range, every
Speaker 2: sprawling continent, and you know, every molten iron core.
Speaker 3: Just an incomprehensible volume of solid rock and metal.
Speaker 2: Exactly Now, I want you to take all of that
Speaker 2: solid mass, grind it down into cosmic dust, and dissolve
Speaker 2: it entirely into the atmosphere of a single raging gas storm, a.
Speaker 3: Storm that is spinning something like one point five billion
Speaker 3: miles away from it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one point five billion miles. By every established metric
Speaker 2: of planetary physics, an object like that shouldn't be mathematically possible.
Speaker 3: It really shouldn't. I mean, the mechanisms required to build
Speaker 3: something that massive that far out in the frozen reaches
Speaker 3: of a star system. They just don't fit into our
Speaker 3: standard model.
Speaker 2: Right, our models of how the universe is supposed to work.
Speaker 2: But today we are looking directly at a celestial behemoth
Speaker 2: that did exactly that.
Speaker 3: It's an object that basically forces us to question the
Speaker 3: fundamental dividing line between planets and stars.
Speaker 2: It totally blurs that line.
Speaker 3: It forces a complete reevaluation. Yeah, because well we find
Speaker 3: deep comfort in neat categorizations.
Speaker 2: Well, it's absolutely human nature, right. We love our little boxes.
Speaker 3: We really do. We prefer a universe where you have,
Speaker 3: you know, planets on one side, objects built from rock
Speaker 3: and ice that maybe sweep up some gas over.
Speaker 2: Time, and then stars on the other side.
Speaker 3: Exactly, stars being these massive self collapsing clouds of nuclear fire.
Speaker 3: We like a hard absolute boundary there.
Speaker 2: But when you actually examine the extreme edge of astrophysics,
Speaker 2: that boundary doesn't just blur. It kind of well, it
Speaker 2: completely dissolves.
Speaker 3: It does you find objects that possess the defining characteristics
Speaker 3: of both existing in this state of absolute diagnostic contradiction,
Speaker 3: and that.
Speaker 2: Brings us to the specific anomaly you asked us to investigate. Today,
Speaker 2: we're talking about twenty nine signey.
Speaker 3: B the ultimate cosmic gray area.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and just to anchor the scale here for you,
Speaker 2: twenty nine signy B is a gas giant with a
Speaker 2: mass roughly fifteen times that of Jupiter.
Speaker 3: Which is just a terrifying amount of mass.
Speaker 2: Fifteen jupiters mashed together into a single sphere, and it
Speaker 2: maintains an orbit at a staggering distance of one point
Speaker 2: five billion.
Speaker 3: Mile that's about two point four billion kilometers for anyone
Speaker 3: doing the conversion right.
Speaker 2: So if you drop this system into our own solar neighborhood,
Speaker 2: twenty nine signey B would be orbiting at almost the
Speaker 2: exact same distance Urinus is from our Sun.
Speaker 3: Which is precisely the detail that makes this such a profound.
Speaker 2: Mystery, because it's so far out in the dark.
Speaker 3: Exactly, you have a mass that borders on the stellar right,
Speaker 3: but combined with an orbital distance that sits in the
Speaker 3: deep frieze of a planetary system.
Speaker 2: What's basically having an identity crisis.
Speaker 3: A massive one. When you look at the mechanics of
Speaker 3: how celestial bodies are actually constructed. Twenty nine signy Bee
Speaker 3: challenges the timelines, the material availability, and just the fundamental
Speaker 3: physics of the whole construction process.
Speaker 2: So our mission for today is to figure out how
Speaker 2: astronomers unraveled that identity crisis.
Speaker 3: It's a fantastic piece of detective work, it really is.
Speaker 2: We need to look at how a team led by
Speaker 2: William Balmer at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope
Speaker 2: Science Institute actually managed to prove something incredible.
Speaker 3: Right, that even the most massively incomprehensible gas giants can
Speaker 3: be built from the ground.
Speaker 2: Up, even the ones we traditionally suspected being like failed stars.
Speaker 2: But before we get to the detective work with the
Speaker 2: James Webb Telescope, we need to lay down some ground rules.
Speaker 3: We have to understand the baseline.
Speaker 2: Yet, right, we need to understand the two very distinct,
Speaker 2: fundamentally opposed ways the universe goes about building worlds.
Speaker 3: Because the universe essentially operates two completely different construction sites.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's look at the first one. This is the
Speaker 2: process that built the ground we are sitting on right now.
Speaker 3: Right, Yes, the bottom up process. It's traditionally known as
Speaker 3: core accretion. This is the classic standard mechanism for planet formation.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's break down accretion because it sounds simple on
Speaker 2: the surface, you know, just stuff bumping into other stuff.
Speaker 3: Like rolling a snowball.
Speaker 2: Right, but the physical reality of doing that on a
Speaker 2: cosmic scale has to be intensely complicated.
Speaker 3: Oh, it is incredibly complex. Yeah, and it operates under
Speaker 3: a strict, unforgiving time limit.
Speaker 2: Wait, a time limit? Why?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 3: Core accretion begins inside a protoplanetary disk. When a newborn
Speaker 3: star ignites. It doesn't consume all the material in its
Speaker 3: stellar nursery, so there's leftovers exactly. The star is surrounded
Speaker 3: by this vast, flattened, spinning disc of leftover hydrogen, helium
Speaker 3: and a tiny, tiny fraction of microscopic dust grains.
Speaker 2: How microscopic are we talking?
Speaker 3: Unimaginably small, often just fractions of a micron across. They're
Speaker 3: mostly composed of silicates, carbon, and ice.
Speaker 2: So the star is sitting in the center of this
Speaker 2: spinning cosmic soup. But how do those microscopic grains ever
Speaker 2: become something the size of Earth litt alone Jupiter. It
Speaker 2: takes a lot of steps, because gravity can't possibly be
Speaker 2: strong enough to pull microscopic dust together.
Speaker 3: Right, You're absolutely right, it isn't. In the very early stages,
Speaker 3: gravity is entirely irrelevant. The initial growth relies entirely on
Speaker 3: electrostatic forces and molecular.
Speaker 2: Bonds, so it's basically just chemistry at that point.
Speaker 3: It is quite literal chemistry. As these microscopic grains drift
Speaker 3: through the gas in the disc, they collide, and if
Speaker 3: the collision is gentle enough Vandrvhal's forces.
Speaker 2: Those are the slight electromagnetic attractions between.
Speaker 3: Molecules, right, yeah, exactly, Those forces allow them to step together.
Speaker 3: They form these incredibly fragile, fluffy aggregates. Think of like
Speaker 3: cosmic dust buddies.
Speaker 2: Okay, dust bunnies I can visualize.
Speaker 3: But as they grow to the size of sand grains
Speaker 3: and then pebbles, they face a gauntlet of physical challenges.
Speaker 2: Challenges like what I mean. I assume space is mostly empty,
Speaker 2: So shouldn't they just keep coasting and sticking together.
Speaker 3: You have to remember the disc is mostly gas, and
Speaker 3: that gas creates aerodynamic drag.
Speaker 2: Oh, so they're fighting a headwind.
Speaker 3: Exactly, as these pebbles grow larger, they begin to decouple
Speaker 3: from the gas flow, they experience a serious headwind. This
Speaker 3: headwind SAPs their orbital momentum, which causes them to slowly
Speaker 3: spiral inward toward the star.
Speaker 2: They're falling in. That seems like a bad design.
Speaker 3: It gets worse once objects reach about the size of
Speaker 3: a boulder roughly a meter across, the electrostatic forces are
Speaker 3: no longer sufficient to hold them together if they collide at.
Speaker 2: High speeds, so instead of sticking.
Speaker 3: They shatter. They smash each other back into dust. This
Speaker 3: is famously known in astrophysics as the meter size barrier.
Speaker 2: That sounds like a fundamental flaw in the planetary assembly line.
Speaker 2: If boulders just smash each other back into dust or
Speaker 2: spiral into the star because of gas drag, how does
Speaker 2: anything ever survive long enough to become a planet.
Speaker 3: That was a persistent headache for astrophysicists for decades.
Speaker 2: Actually, I can imagine. So what's the workaround?
Speaker 3: The current understanding involves areas of the disc where gas
Speaker 3: pressure is slightly higher, creating local traps like pressure pockets, yeah,
Speaker 3: pressure bumps. In these bumps, the gas headwind essentially disappears,
Speaker 3: allowing the pebbles and boulders to accumulate in massive dense
Speaker 3: swarms well also a cosmic traffic jam a perfect analogy.
Speaker 3: And when the density of these solid swarms reaches a
Speaker 3: critical threshold, their collective mutual gravity finally takes over.
Speaker 2: So gravity finally kicks in big time.
Speaker 3: The entire swarm collapses in on itself almost instantly, completely
Speaker 3: bypassing that meter sized barrier to form solid bodies that
Speaker 3: are hundreds of kilometers across.
Speaker 2: And those are the planetesimals.
Speaker 3: We call them planet tesimals.
Speaker 2: Yes, so chemistry gets you to pebbles, aerodynamics forces the
Speaker 2: pebbles into dense traffic jams, and then gravity suddenly forces
Speaker 2: the traffic jam to collapse into a solid rock that
Speaker 2: is the core in core accretion precisely.
Speaker 3: And once you have a planetesimal, gravity rules. It sweeps
Speaker 3: through the disc, using its gravitational cross section to pull
Speaker 3: in surrounding pebbles and other planetesimal.
Speaker 2: So it just bullies everything else in its path.
Speaker 3: It really does. It grows into a protoplanet. Now, if
Speaker 3: we are talking about building a rocky world like Earth,
Speaker 3: the process largely stops here. That takes tens of millions
Speaker 3: of years.
Speaker 2: Okay, but what if we want to build a Jupiter.
Speaker 3: If we are building a gas giant, the protoplanet must
Speaker 3: reach a critical mass to typically around ten times the
Speaker 3: mass of the Earth very very quickly.
Speaker 2: Why the rush and why specifically ten earth masses.
Speaker 3: Ten earth masses is roughly the threshold where the solid
Speaker 3: core's gravity becomes so intense that it can begin to
Speaker 3: hold on to the surrounding hydrogen and helium gas.
Speaker 2: Oh against the thermal pressure trying to push that gas
Speaker 2: away exactly.
Speaker 3: At first, it is a slow bleed. The core pulls
Speaker 3: in a thin envelope of gas, but as that envelope
Speaker 3: cools and compresses, it allows more gas.
Speaker 2: To fall in it's snowballing.
Speaker 3: It leads to a dramatic tipping point. Once the mass
Speaker 3: of the gas envelope equals the mass of the solid core,
Speaker 3: the planet undergoes runaway gas secretion.
Speaker 2: Runaway accretion. So it just violently vacuums up the rest of.
Speaker 3: The gas violently and rapidly. It vacuums up astronomical volumes
Speaker 3: of gas, swelling into a Jupiter sized giant in a
Speaker 3: fraction of the time it took to build the actual core.
Speaker 2: Okay, but earlier you mentioned an unforgiving time limit. Where
Speaker 2: does the ticking clock come into play during this runaway
Speaker 2: accretion phase?
Speaker 3: The clock is dictated by the host star itself, you see,
Speaker 3: a newborn star is wildly active. It emits fierce ultraviolet
Speaker 3: and X ray radiation along with these really powerful stellar.
Speaker 2: Winds, so it's blasting the disc constantly.
Speaker 3: These high energy photons bombard the surface of the protoplanetary disc,
Speaker 3: superheating the gas, and as the gas heats up, its
Speaker 3: fumble velocity increases.
Speaker 2: So it's too hot to hold onto.
Speaker 3: Eventually, yes, the gas molecules are moving so fast that
Speaker 3: they exceed the gravitational escape velocity of the entire star system.
Speaker 2: They just boil away into deep space.
Speaker 3: They do This process is called photo evaporation, and it
Speaker 3: will completely strip a typical system of its gas within
Speaker 3: roughly three to ten million years.
Speaker 2: Wow. Three to ten million years on a cosmic scale
Speaker 2: is like nothing.
Speaker 3: It's the blink of an eye. And once the gas
Speaker 3: is gone, the runaway accretion process is dead. If a
Speaker 3: solid core hasn't reached that ten earth mass threshold by
Speaker 3: the time the gas evaporates, it will forever remain a
Speaker 3: rocky or icy world.
Speaker 2: So that's why we have so many rocky worlds and
Speaker 2: so few gas giants.
Speaker 3: Exactly, building a giant requires threading an incredibly tight needle.
Speaker 3: You have to navigate the meter sized barrier, build a
Speaker 3: massive core, and trigger runaway accretion before the star blows
Speaker 3: all the raw materials into the void.
Speaker 2: Okay. That paints a remarkably chaotic and difficult picture of
Speaker 2: bottom up planet formation. It is a wildly inefficient process.
Speaker 3: Highly inefficient.
Speaker 2: Let's pivot to the second recipe then, because if accretion
Speaker 2: is a desperate race against the clock, the top down process,
Speaker 2: fragmentation feels like an entirely different category of physics.
Speaker 3: It is entirely different both in mechanism and in scale.
Speaker 3: While core accretion happens inside the disc around a star,
Speaker 3: fragmentation is typically the mechanism that forms the stars themselves.
Speaker 2: So we're talking about a much larger scale here.
Speaker 3: Massive we're talking about events that occur inside giant molecular clouds.
Speaker 3: These are unimaginably vast structures of cold, diffuse gas drifting
Speaker 3: in the interstellar medium like how big, oh, often spanning
Speaker 3: dozens of light years across.
Speaker 2: Okay, I am struggling to visualize how something that vast
Speaker 2: and diffuse turns into a dense, burning star. What actually
Speaker 2: initiates the colass.
Speaker 3: It all comes down to a battle between thermal pressure
Speaker 3: and gravity heat versus weight exactly. Even though the gas
Speaker 3: in a molecular cloud is incredibly cold, I mean, often
Speaker 3: just a few degrees above absolute zero, the molecule still
Speaker 3: possess thermal motion.
Speaker 2: Right, They're still vibrating.
Speaker 3: They vibrate and bounce off each other, creating an outward
Speaker 3: pressure that keeps the cloud inflated. However, these clouds are
Speaker 3: not perfectly uniform.
Speaker 2: They have lumpy bits.
Speaker 3: They have slightly denser pockets, yes, perhaps triggered by a
Speaker 3: passing shockwave from a distant supernova or even the galactic
Speaker 3: magnetic field.
Speaker 2: So gravity is trying to pull the pocket inward while
Speaker 2: the heat of the gas is trying to push it outward.
Speaker 3: You've got it, and there's a mathematical tipping point for this,
Speaker 3: known as the Genes mass, named after the British physicist
Speaker 3: James Jenes.
Speaker 2: The Genes mass, okay.
Speaker 3: The Gene's mass dictates that if a clump of gas
Speaker 3: reaches a certain critical density and is cold enough, the
Speaker 3: outward thermal pressure simply cannot support the inward pull of
Speaker 3: its own gravity. And when that happened, the moment that
Speaker 3: threshold is crossed, the entire clump becomes gravitationally unstable. It
Speaker 3: enters a state of freefall.
Speaker 2: A sudden, violent collapse, so not millions of years of
Speaker 2: gathering pebbles, but an instant structural failure of the cloud itself.
Speaker 3: The scale and speed are orders of magnitude different from accretion.
Speaker 3: As the pocket collapses, the material compresses, increasing the density.
Speaker 2: Which only accelerates the gravity exactly.
Speaker 3: The center of this collapsing fragment grows incredibly hot and dense,
Speaker 3: eventually igniting nuclear fusion and becoming.
Speaker 2: A star, and the leftovers form the disc.
Speaker 3: Right the remaining gas swirling around it flattens out into
Speaker 3: the protoplanetary disc we just discussed.
Speaker 2: Okay, but this creates a major logical hurdle for me.
Speaker 2: You just describe the process for making a star a
Speaker 2: massive nuclear fusing furnace.
Speaker 4: I did.
Speaker 2: But the object we are investigating today, twenty nine signy B,
Speaker 2: is definitively categorized as a planet. Why are astronomers even
Speaker 2: applying star formation physics to an object that orbits a star?
Speaker 3: And that is the core of the diagnostic muddy waters
Speaker 3: we find ourselves in today, Because, as it turns out,
Speaker 3: the universe doesn't restrict fragmentations solely to stellar nurseries.
Speaker 2: Wait, really, where else does it happen?
Speaker 3: Under very specific conditions, it is there uhetically possible for
Speaker 3: a localized version of fragmentation to occur within the outer
Speaker 3: tenuous edges of a protoplanetary disk itself. Inside the disk,
Speaker 3: astronomers call this disk instability or top down disk fragmentation.
Speaker 2: So you have the star already formed, you have the
Speaker 2: disc spinning around it, and instead of pebbles slowly gathering
Speaker 2: to make a planet, a massive chunk of the disk
Speaker 2: just suddenly collapses.
Speaker 3: Conceptually, yes, imagine the outer fringes of a massive, early
Speaker 3: stage protoplanetary disk. We're talking perhaps a billion miles or
Speaker 3: more away from the central star.
Speaker 2: Outward, it's incredibly cold.
Speaker 3: Exactly out there. The radiation from the star is incredibly weak.
Speaker 3: The gas in the disc is profoundly cold, which means
Speaker 3: its outward thermal pressure is very very.
Speaker 2: Low, so it's vulnerable to gravity, highly vulnerable.
Speaker 3: If the disc is massive enough, the sheer weight of
Speaker 3: the gas can trigger a localized gravitational instability. A large
Speaker 3: spiral arm or clump within the disc can suddenly fragment
Speaker 3: and collapse in on itself.
Speaker 2: Wow, and how long does that take?
Speaker 3: It forms a massive gaseous body in a matter of
Speaker 3: hundreds or thousands of.
Speaker 2: Years, oh wow, rather than millions exactly.
Speaker 3: It skips the rock gathering phase entirely. It just takes
Speaker 3: a massive bite out of the gas disc all at once.
Speaker 2: And because it formed so quickly, it completely bypasses the
Speaker 2: ticking clock of the star evaporating the disk precisely.
Speaker 3: Disc fragmentation is the leading theoretical explanation for why we
Speaker 3: occasionally find incredibly massive gas giant like objects orbiting at
Speaker 3: extreme distances from their host stars, which.
Speaker 2: Brings us directly to the paradox of twenty nine signey B.
Speaker 2: Because this object seems mathematically designed to frustrate both of
Speaker 2: these theories simultaneously.
Speaker 3: It is the perfect troublemaker.
Speaker 2: Let's look at the numbers. Lead researcher William Balmer and
Speaker 2: his team at Johns Hopkins zeroed in on twenty nine
Speaker 2: signey B because it sits at roughly fifteen times the
Speaker 2: massive Jupiter. Right now, I know that in the context
Speaker 2: of our solar system, fifteen jupiters is terrifyingly huge huge,
Speaker 2: But in the context of these two formation models. Why
Speaker 2: is that specific mass such a massive headache?
Speaker 3: Because fifteen jupiter masses represents the fulcrum point between the
Speaker 3: absolute limits of both theories.
Speaker 2: It's right on the boundary.
Speaker 3: It is a mass that should theoretically be impossible for
Speaker 3: either mechanism to comfortably achieve.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's start with the top down fragmentation model. Why
Speaker 2: is fifteen jupiter's a problem there?
Speaker 3: Well, when a cloud of gas collapses, whether it's in
Speaker 3: a molecular cloud or a disc, it creates a massive
Speaker 3: gravitational well, it naturally wants to gorge on the surrounding material.
Speaker 3: It's greedy, very greedy. It wants to become a star,
Speaker 3: or at least a brown dwarf, you know, a substellar
Speaker 3: object massive enough to fuse deuterium but not standard hydrogen.
Speaker 2: So a collapsing cloud doesn't just stop halfway. It pulls
Speaker 2: in everything it can reach.
Speaker 3: Exactly. The physical mechanics of fragmentation naturally produce massive objects.
Speaker 3: In hydrodynamic computer simulations, trying to get a fragmentation collapse
Speaker 3: to halt its growth at merely fifteen jupiter masses is
Speaker 3: incredibly difficult.
Speaker 2: Wants to keep growing.
Speaker 3: There is an opacity limit in the physics of collapse
Speaker 3: in gas that makes forming small fragments extremely inefficient. Fifteen
Speaker 3: jupiter masses is essentially the absolute floor. It's the lowest
Speaker 3: possible mass you could realistically expect a top down collapse
Speaker 3: to produce.
Speaker 2: It's the smallest possible star like collapse. Okay, but what
Speaker 2: about the bottom up accretion side. If it's the floor
Speaker 2: for fragmentation, how does it fit into the pebble gathering model.
Speaker 3: It acts as the absolute ceiling the ceiling. Yes, we
Speaker 3: establish that core accretion is a race against time to
Speaker 3: build a core, trigger runaway gas accretion, and swallow fifteen
Speaker 3: jupiter's worth of mass before the stars radiation boils the
Speaker 3: disc away. It basically stretches the timeline of physical models
Speaker 3: to their breaking point.
Speaker 2: The math just doesn't work out.
Speaker 3: Achieving fifteen jupiter masses through accretion requires a disk of
Speaker 3: unimaginable density, perfect conditions, and zero interruptions. It is the
Speaker 3: absolute highest mass a bottom up process could plausibly yield.
Speaker 2: I see the dilemma. You have an object sitting exactly
Speaker 2: on the razor's edge. It's either the smallest possible fragment
Speaker 2: or the largest possible.
Speaker 3: Creed stubbornly right in the middle.
Speaker 2: But I want to push back on the accretion theory
Speaker 2: here because we haven't factored in the orbital distance yet.
Speaker 2: Twenty nine signy B is one point five billion miles
Speaker 2: away from its host star, which is immense out at
Speaker 2: the distance of Uranus. The available material in a disk
Speaker 2: is incredibly sparse, right The dust and pebbles are spread
Speaker 2: over a massive volume.
Speaker 3: Of space, They are very thinly distributed.
Speaker 2: And orbital velocities are sluggish out there, meaning planetesimals aren't
Speaker 2: exactly sweeping through material very quickly. Doesn't that sheer distance
Speaker 2: almost entirely disqualify the slow bottom up process.
Speaker 3: Your intuition is aligned perfectly with the historical assumption of
Speaker 3: the astronomical.
Speaker 2: Community, so they thought the same thing they did.
Speaker 3: The standard model of core accretion dictates that building a
Speaker 3: ten earth mass core at a distance of one point
Speaker 3: five billion miles should take tens, perhaps hundreds of millions
Speaker 3: of years, But.
Speaker 2: The gas in the disk evaporates an under ten million exactly.
Speaker 3: The math simply does not close. Therefore, the long standing
Speaker 3: assumption has been that any massive object found at those
Speaker 3: extreme distances must be the result of sudden top down
Speaker 3: disc fragmentation.
Speaker 2: Because bottom up accretion shouldn't be physically capable of operating
Speaker 2: fast enough in that sparse, frozen environment.
Speaker 3: That was the accepted logic.
Speaker 2: Yes, but the Boemer team wasn't satisfied with a logical assumption.
Speaker 2: They didn't want to just guess that it was fragmentation
Speaker 2: based on the distance.
Speaker 3: Well. They wanted proof.
Speaker 2: They wanted definitive physical proof of how twenty nine signy
Speaker 2: view was constructed. And to get that proof, they couldn't
Speaker 2: just rely on math. They needed to actually look at
Speaker 2: the object. They needed to analyze its structural DNA.
Speaker 3: Which is an undertaking of monumental difficulty I can imagine.
Speaker 3: I mean you are attempting to isolate the light of
Speaker 3: a planet located billions of miles away from us, sitting
Speaker 3: immediately adjacent to a star that is millions of times
Speaker 3: brighter than the planet itself.
Speaker 2: This is where the Janes Web space telescope.
Speaker 3: Enters the narrative, the perfect tool for the job.
Speaker 2: Because standard ground based telescopes and even the Hubble Space
Speaker 2: telescope they don't have the specific capabilities required to pull
Speaker 2: this off. Bohmer's team had to use one of the
Speaker 2: most advanced instruments on web, the near infrared camera or NIRCam. Yes,
Speaker 2: an ircam, but they couldn't just point and shoot. They
Speaker 2: had to utilize a very specific optical technique called corenography,
Speaker 2: a vital technique now, as we know, directly imaging an
Speaker 2: exoplanet is often compared to trying to spot a single
Speaker 2: firefly hovering right next to an industrial searchlight from miles away.
Speaker 3: It's an excellent comparison.
Speaker 2: So how does a coronagraph actually solve that contrast problem?
Speaker 3: It is a brilliant piece of optical engineering. When light
Speaker 3: from a distant star enters a telescope, it doesn't just
Speaker 3: form a single perfect point on.
Speaker 2: The detector, It spreads out right.
Speaker 3: Due to the wave nature of light, it diffracts around
Speaker 3: the edges of the telescope's mirrors. This creates a bright
Speaker 3: central point surrounded by a series of concentric rings of
Speaker 3: light known as an airy pattern. Okay, even if the
Speaker 3: planet is physically separated from the star, the glare from
Speaker 3: those diffraction wings will completely wash out the faint light
Speaker 3: of the planet, so the.
Speaker 2: Star is essentially bleeding light across the entire image.
Speaker 3: Exactly a coronagraph is a complex series of masks and
Speaker 3: optical baffles housed inside the NIACAM instrument itself, so it's hardware,
Speaker 3: not just software, physical hardware. The first mask physically blocks
Speaker 3: the central, brightest core of the star's light.
Speaker 2: Like putting your thumb up to block the sun.
Speaker 3: Exactly like that, but that doesn't solve the diffraction rings,
Speaker 3: so the light passes through further optical elements, specifically something.
Speaker 2: Called a liot stock a liot stop. What does that do?
Speaker 3: The liot stop is meticulously designed to match the specific
Speaker 3: geometry of the telescope's primary mirror. It actively suppresses those
Speaker 3: scattered diffraction rings, essentially creating an artificial, near perfect eclipse
Speaker 3: inside the camera. That is why, by carefully managing how
Speaker 3: the light waves interfere with themselves, the coronagraph dims the
Speaker 3: stars glare by factors of tens of thousands, completely revealing
Speaker 3: the space immediately surrounding it.
Speaker 2: It's an internal engineered eclipse exactly. But even with the
Speaker 2: glare reduced, the planet itself has to be visible, and
Speaker 2: planets don't produce their own visible light. They only reflect
Speaker 2: the stars light, which is incredibly faint.
Speaker 3: Which is why Balmer's team wasn't looking for reflected visible
Speaker 3: light at all.
Speaker 2: Well, they weren't.
Speaker 3: No, they designed their observation program around a very specific
Speaker 3: target profile. Twenty nine signy B was just the first
Speaker 3: of four distinct objects they selected for this.
Speaker 2: Okay, what were the criteria.
Speaker 3: To make the cut? The objects had to weigh between
Speaker 3: one and fifteen jupiter masses, they had to orbit within
Speaker 3: roughly nine billion miles of their host stars, and most critically,
Speaker 3: they had to be astronomically young.
Speaker 2: Let's unpack the age requirement. We're dealing with objects that
Speaker 2: have temperatures ranging from about one thousand to nineteen hundred
Speaker 2: degrees fahrenheit, which is roughly five hundred and thirty to
Speaker 2: one thousand degrees celsius extremely hot. Why is a scorching
Speaker 2: hot temperature required to see them? If the corona graph
Speaker 2: is blocking the star, why does the planet need to
Speaker 2: be practically on fire?
Speaker 3: Because that extreme temperature allows the James Webb Space Telescope
Speaker 3: to bypass the reliance on reflected light entirely.
Speaker 2: Wait, so that heat isn't from the star.
Speaker 3: No, that heat isn't generated by the host star warming
Speaker 3: the planet. The distance is far too great For that
Speaker 3: that nineteen hundred degree temperature is the literal residual friction
Speaker 3: and gravitational energy left over from the planet's violent.
Speaker 2: Birth, the energy of assembling exactly.
Speaker 3: Think about the sheer kinetic energy of billions of trillions
Speaker 3: of tons of rock, ice, and gas crashing together, compressing
Speaker 3: under their own immense gravity.
Speaker 2: That's a lot of friction.
Speaker 3: It is that gravitational potential energy is converted directly into
Speaker 3: thermal energy. This is governed by some than called the
Speaker 3: Kelvin Helmholtz mechanism. As a giant planet forms, it is
Speaker 3: initially incredibly puffed up and searingly hot. Over millions of years,
Speaker 3: it slowly shrinks and radiates that primordial heat out into
Speaker 3: the void of space.
Speaker 2: So it is glowing like an ember pulled fresh from
Speaker 2: a fire.
Speaker 3: And that is the secret to direct imaging. Any object
Speaker 3: with a temperature emits electromagnetic radiation, a concept known as
Speaker 3: black body radiation. Okay, for an object between one thoy
Speaker 3: and nineteen hundred degrees fahrenheit, the peak of that radiation
Speaker 3: doesn't fall on the visible spectrum that human eyes can see.
Speaker 2: Where does it fall?
Speaker 3: According to Wein's displacement law, the peak emission shifts into
Speaker 3: the infrared spectrum.
Speaker 2: Which is exactly what the James Web Space Telescope was
Speaker 2: engineered to see.
Speaker 3: Precisely, the host star is incredibly bright and visible light,
Speaker 3: but much less dominant in the specific infrared bands where
Speaker 3: the planet is actively glowing.
Speaker 2: Oh that's clever.
Speaker 3: By using ni RCAM to look in the infrared and
Speaker 3: using the chronograph to block the star, the contrast ratio
Speaker 3: shifts from an impossible billion to one to a manageable
Speaker 3: few thousand to one.
Speaker 2: So they aren't looking for a firefly reflecting a searchlight.
Speaker 2: They're using thermal goggles to spot a massive glowing heat
Speaker 2: source in the dark.
Speaker 3: A perfect way to put it.
Speaker 2: Now, this specific temperature range, this nineteen hundred degree heat
Speaker 2: wasn't just useful for visibility, though. The researchers noted that
Speaker 2: this specific thermal profile placed twenty nine signy B in
Speaker 2: a very similar atmospheric state to other well studied planetary systems.
Speaker 3: That was a very deliberate choice on their part, right.
Speaker 2: The team had previously analyzed a famous system gon HR
Speaker 2: eight seven ninety nine, which has multiple directly imaged planets.
Speaker 2: By targeting an object with a similar temperature they could
Speaker 2: ensure the atmospheric chemistry was behaving in predictable ways, allowing
Speaker 2: them to compare their findings acurately.
Speaker 3: That is a crucial point of scientific rigor. Temperature radically
Speaker 3: dictates atmospheric chemistry. It determines whether certain molecules exist as gases, liquids,
Speaker 3: or are locked up in solid clouds deep in the atmosphere.
Speaker 3: By keeping the thermal baseline consistent with prior studies, they
Speaker 3: isolated the variables.
Speaker 2: So Web successfully navigates the glare. It captures the infrared
Speaker 2: photons emitted by the residual heat of twenty nine signa B.
Speaker 2: They have the image a glowing dot on a dark.
Speaker 3: Background, A beautiful glowing dot.
Speaker 2: But a picture alone doesn't solve a physical mystery. A
Speaker 2: glowing dot doesn't tell you if it gathered pebbles or
Speaker 2: if the sky collapsed on it.
Speaker 3: No, it does not.
Speaker 2: The actual answer was encoded within the specific architecture of
Speaker 2: that infrared light.
Speaker 3: Capturing the light is merely the gathering of evidence. The
Speaker 3: actual interrogation of that evidence is the science of spectroscopy.
Speaker 2: Right reading the light.
Speaker 3: Exactly when the intense heat from the planet's deep interior
Speaker 3: radiates outward. It doesn't just travel freely into space. It
Speaker 3: must first pass through the planet's own thick, swirling atmosphere.
Speaker 2: And that atmosphere acts as a filter.
Speaker 3: An incredibly complex chemical filter.
Speaker 2: How exactly does a gas filter light? Are we talking
Speaker 2: about the gases physically blocking the photons.
Speaker 3: In a quantum mechanical sense. Yes, Every molecule in the universe,
Speaker 3: whether it's water, methane, or carbon dioxide, has a very
Speaker 3: specific internal structure. Okay, The atoms in a molecule are
Speaker 3: bound together, and those bonds can vibrate, stretch, and rotate,
Speaker 3: but they can only do so at very precise, discrete energy.
Speaker 2: Levels, so they're picky about their energy, very picky.
Speaker 3: When a photon of infrared light hits a molecule, if
Speaker 3: that photon's specific energy its exact wavelength perfectly matches the
Speaker 3: energy required to make that molecule vibrate, the molecule will
Speaker 3: absorb the photon.
Speaker 2: The photon is literally consumed to power the vibration of.
Speaker 3: The gas exactly. But if the photon's energy doesn't match perfectly,
Speaker 3: it passes right through unabstracted. Okay, I followed, So when
Speaker 3: the James Web space telescope collects the broadband infrared light
Speaker 3: from twenty nine to signay B. It passes that light
Speaker 3: through specialized.
Speaker 2: Filters and splits it up into a spectrum.
Speaker 3: Right the astronomers look at the resulting spectrum and they
Speaker 3: look for the missing pieces. They look for the exact
Speaker 3: wavelengths of light that never made it to the telescope
Speaker 3: because they were absorbed by the atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Like a barcode a chemical fingerprint left in the shadows
Speaker 2: of the light.
Speaker 3: A perfect description. And when Bomber's team analyzed the spectral
Speaker 3: bar code of twenty nine signy B, they found profound
Speaker 3: absorption signatures.
Speaker 2: What was missing.
Speaker 3: Entire bands of infrared light were completely missing, absorbed by
Speaker 3: two very specific molecules, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide CO
Speaker 3: two and COO.
Speaker 2: So they found massive quantities of carbon and oxygen in
Speaker 2: the atmosphere.
Speaker 3: Huge quantities.
Speaker 2: Now, as we know, astronomers have that remarkably quirky habit
Speaker 2: of categorizing elements. While a chemist would define carbon and
Speaker 2: oxygen as non metals, astrophysics takes a much broader brush
Speaker 2: to the periodic table.
Speaker 3: It is a bit of a historical idiosyncrasy of the field.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's always funny to me.
Speaker 3: Well, in the context of astrophysics, the universe began with
Speaker 3: the Big Bang, which produced almost exclusively hydrogen and a
Speaker 3: little bit of helium.
Speaker 2: Right the light stuff.
Speaker 3: Every single other element on the periodic table carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron,
Speaker 3: silicon was forged much later through nuclear fusion in the
Speaker 3: hearts of stars or in the explosive deaths of supernovae.
Speaker 2: So they all have that same explosive origin story.
Speaker 3: Because all of these heavier elements share this common forged origin,
Speaker 3: astronomers simply lump them all together under the collective term metals.
Speaker 2: So when we talk about the metallicity of a star
Speaker 2: or a planet, we aren't talking about shiny conductive materials.
Speaker 4: Yeah, not at all.
Speaker 2: We are talking about the sheer abundance of heavy complex
Speaker 2: elements like the carbon and oxygen found in twenty nine
Speaker 2: signey B compared to the baseline hydrogen and helium.
Speaker 3: Correct, And this is where the spectrum of twenty nine
Speaker 3: signey B completely shattered the ambiguity of its origin. How So,
Speaker 3: by measuring the depth and width of those carbon monoxide
Speaker 3: and carbon dioxide absorption lines, the researchers could calculate the
Speaker 3: total concentration of these metals in the pla planet's atmosphere, and.
Speaker 2: To understand the significance of that number, they had to
Speaker 2: compare it to a baseline exactly.
Speaker 3: And the baseline is the host star itself.
Speaker 2: Because the star and the planet formed from the exact
Speaker 2: same original molecular cloud.
Speaker 3: Precisely, the host star's composition represents the original, unaltered recipe
Speaker 3: of the raw materials available in that specific region of space.
Speaker 2: So what was the star mate?
Speaker 3: If the host star of twenty nine Signabe has a
Speaker 3: metallicity very similar to our own Sun, mostly hydrogen and
Speaker 3: helium with the standard sprinkling of heavier.
Speaker 2: Elements, Okay, and the planet.
Speaker 3: When the team calculated the metallicity of twenty nine Signabe,
Speaker 3: they found it was massively inexplicably enriched compared to its star.
Speaker 2: How enriched are we talking? Give me the scale.
Speaker 3: When they took the atmospheric concentration of these heavy elements
Speaker 3: and extrapolated it across the entire fifteen jupiter mass volume
Speaker 3: of the planet, the math revealed a staggering stockpile.
Speaker 2: Okay, twenty nine.
Speaker 3: Signab contains a total mass of heavy elements equivalent to
Speaker 3: roughly one hundred and fifty earths.
Speaker 2: One hundred and fifty earths. Yes, I really want to
Speaker 2: linger on the physical reality of that number. We aren't
Speaker 2: just talking about a wisp of gas, not at all.
Speaker 2: We are talking about the mass equivalent of one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty solid rocky metallic planets, complete with silicate mantles
Speaker 2: and iron nickel cores. One hundred and fifty earth's worth
Speaker 2: of solid material, completely ground up, vaporized, and integrated into
Speaker 2: the gaseous envelope of this single giant.
Speaker 3: It is a terrifying amount of heavy material, and it
Speaker 3: is the definitive smoking gun evidence that solves the formation mystery.
Speaker 2: Let me make sure the logic is completely airtight here.
Speaker 2: Let's go back to the top down fragmentation theory, the
Speaker 2: idea that a massive chunk of the disc just suddenly
Speaker 2: became unstable and collapsed under its own gravity.
Speaker 3: Right the star formation physics.
Speaker 2: If that had happened, why wouldn't it have one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty earths of metal in it? Doesn't the disc
Speaker 2: have dust in it?
Speaker 3: The disc does have dust, but you have to consider
Speaker 3: the specific mechanism of the collapse. Okay, if a massive
Speaker 3: section of the discs pola suffers a gravitational collapse. It
Speaker 3: is an indiscriminate process. It aggressively sweeps up everything in
Speaker 3: that region simultaneously, the gas and the dust together.
Speaker 2: It doesn't sort it out exactly.
Speaker 3: Therefore, the resulting object will have the exact same chemical ratio,
Speaker 3: the exact same metallicity as the bulk disc itself.
Speaker 2: And the bulk disc has the exact same metallicity as
Speaker 2: the host star.
Speaker 3: Which is very low in metals. So a sudden collapse
Speaker 3: would just trap the baseline recipe. It would result in
Speaker 3: a massive gas balloon composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium,
Speaker 3: with only a trace amount of heavy elements.
Speaker 2: Because a top down fragmentation process possesses no physical mechanism
Speaker 2: to separate the heavy elements from the light.
Speaker 3: Gas, it cannot selectively enrich itself. It just takes whatever
Speaker 3: is there in the ratios that are there.
Speaker 2: But the bottom up accretion process, the slow, tedious gathering
Speaker 2: of pebbles. How does that explain this massive localized spike
Speaker 2: in carbon and oxygen.
Speaker 3: Because core accretion is, by its very nature a mechanism
Speaker 3: of separation and concentration.
Speaker 2: Oh really, remember the.
Speaker 3: Timeline we discussed long before. Our protoplanet is massive enough
Speaker 3: to start pulling in hydrogen gas. It is orbiting through
Speaker 3: the disc, acting as a relentless gravitational vacuum cleaner, right
Speaker 3: gathering pebbles, but it is specifically vacuuming up the solid material.
Speaker 2: The rocks, the pebbles, the ice.
Speaker 3: Yes, and what are those rocks and ice made of.
Speaker 3: They are composed almost entirely of heavy elements carbon, oxygen, silicates,
Speaker 3: and iron.
Speaker 2: So it's hoarding the metals exactly.
Speaker 3: As the protoplanet spends millions of years plowing through the disc.
Speaker 3: It is selectively stockpiling the metals while ignoring the gas.
Speaker 2: Entirely building a massive core.
Speaker 3: It is building a massively dense, incredibly metal rich core,
Speaker 3: and as more planetesimals crash into this growing core, the
Speaker 3: sheer kinetic energy of the impacts vaporizes them, releasing those
Speaker 3: heavy elements into the planet's growing atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Ah. So by the time the planet finally triggers runaway
Speaker 2: gas accretion and pulls in the massive hydrogen envelope, it
Speaker 2: is already hoarded an immense concentrated supply of heavy elements.
Speaker 3: Precisely the only physical way to achieve a metallicity that
Speaker 3: is massively higher than the host star. The only way
Speaker 3: to concentrate one hundred and fifty earth's worth of heavy
Speaker 3: elements into a single object is to spend millions of
Speaker 3: years selectively sweeping up solid debris before accumulating the bulk
Speaker 3: of the gas. The chemical fingerprint in the atmosphere definitively
Speaker 3: rules out fragmentation. Twenty nine signy B was built from
Speaker 3: the bottom up.
Speaker 2: That is just an incredibly elegant piece of deduction. They
Speaker 2: use the chemical exhaust in the atmosphere to reconstruct the
Speaker 2: mechanical history of the object.
Speaker 3: It's beautiful science.
Speaker 2: But in science, a paradigm shifting claim requires an ironclad foundation,
Speaker 2: and Bahmer's team knew that atmospheric chemistry, while compelling, is
Speaker 2: only one line of evidence.
Speaker 3: You always want corroboration.
Speaker 2: Exactly to definitively close the case on twenty nine signey B,
Speaker 2: they needed a second, entirely independent verification. They needed to
Speaker 2: look past the chemistry and examine the orbital mechanics.
Speaker 3: They needed to corroborate the crime scene by looking at
Speaker 3: how the planet actually moves, which.
Speaker 2: Brings us to the work of co author Ash Messier,
Speaker 2: a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, and their use
Speaker 2: of the CHARA.
Speaker 3: Array an incredible facility.
Speaker 2: JARA stands for the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy
Speaker 2: and it is located on Mount Wilson in California. Now
Speaker 2: CHARA isn't just a big mirror pointing at the sky.
Speaker 2: It is an optical interferometer array. Explain the physics of
Speaker 2: interferometry to me, because the way it simulates a massive
Speaker 2: telescope is mind bending.
Speaker 3: It is one of the most demanding engineering feats in
Speaker 3: ground based astronomy today. To track the precise orbital dynamics
Speaker 3: of twenty nine SIGNA I, B, and more importantly, to
Speaker 3: measure the exact physical orientation of its host star, the
Speaker 3: team needed unprecedented angular resolution.
Speaker 2: Meaning they needed to see things incredibly clearly.
Speaker 3: They needed to see details so fine that no single
Speaker 3: tele telescope mirror on Earth is large enough to resolve them.
Speaker 3: So CHORA uses an array of six separate, smaller telescopes
Speaker 3: spread out across the mountain in a Y shape.
Speaker 2: But wait, how does having six separate small telescopes help
Speaker 2: if none of them are big enough on their own.
Speaker 3: By meticulously combining the light they capture. Okay, how when
Speaker 3: the light waves from the distant star system arrive at Earth,
Speaker 3: they hit the different telescopes at very slightly different times,
Speaker 3: separated by fractions of a nanosecond, depending on where the
Speaker 3: telescope is physically situated on the mountain right.
Speaker 2: Because of the angle of the star in the.
Speaker 3: Sky exactly, Chara funnels the light from all six telescopes
Speaker 3: through a complex vacuum tube system into a central beam
Speaker 3: combining room.
Speaker 2: Vacuum tubes yes to.
Speaker 3: Prevent air turbulence from distorting the light. Here in the
Speaker 3: combining room, the light bounces off mirrors on incredibly precise
Speaker 3: motorized carts called delay lines.
Speaker 2: What are the carts delaying?
Speaker 3: They are constantly moving back and forth on rails to
Speaker 3: add microscopic amounts of extra travel distance to the light
Speaker 3: arriving at the close telescopes.
Speaker 2: Even it out exactly.
Speaker 3: The goal is to ensure that the light waves from
Speaker 3: all six telescopes arrive at the final detector at the
Speaker 3: exact same femtosecond.
Speaker 2: And what happens when they do.
Speaker 3: When the wave peaks and wave troughs perfectly align, they
Speaker 3: undergo constructive interference, they combine to form an interference fringe.
Speaker 2: Pattern, and that perfect alignment creates a virtual telescope exactly.
Speaker 3: By combining the light in this way, Chura achieves the
Speaker 3: angular resolution equivalent to a single monstrous telescope whose mirror
Speaker 3: is as wide as the maximum distance between the farthest.
Speaker 2: Telescopes in the array, which is how big.
Speaker 3: Over three hundred and thirty meters across.
Speaker 2: That's a massive mirror.
Speaker 3: It allows them to measure the microscopic wobble and the
Speaker 3: exact physical dimensions of stars that appear as nothing more
Speaker 3: than unresolved pinpricks to almost any other observatory on the planet.
Speaker 2: So armed with this incredible resolving power, ash Messia and
Speaker 2: the team analyze the system. They updated the precise orbital
Speaker 2: path of twenty nine signa BI, tracking how it moves
Speaker 2: through space. Yes, but crucially, they also measured the host
Speaker 2: star itself. By analyzing the subtle Doppler shifts and gravity
Speaker 2: darkening across the surface of the star, they were able
Speaker 2: to determine the exact tilt of the star's rotational axis.
Speaker 3: They figured out exactly how the star is spinning.
Speaker 2: And when they compared the stars spin to the planet's orbit.
Speaker 2: They found the mechanical smoking gun. The alignment was perfect,
Speaker 2: perfect alignment. The planet's orbital inclination is flawlessly aligned with
Speaker 2: the equatorial spin axis of the star.
Speaker 3: This is a monumental piece of corroborating evidence.
Speaker 2: Let's break down why.
Speaker 3: To grasp why this alignment is so definitive, we have
Speaker 3: to return to the fundamental physics of the initial molecular
Speaker 3: cloud collapse. We have to talk about the conservation of
Speaker 3: angular momentum.
Speaker 2: Okay, this is where I always visualize a chef tossing
Speaker 2: pizza dough.
Speaker 3: It's a great visual When.
Speaker 2: The chef throws the dough into the air and gives
Speaker 2: it a spin, This centripetal force causes the dough to
Speaker 2: expand and flatten out into a wide, thin disk. Everything
Speaker 2: embedded in that dough is rotating on the exact same
Speaker 2: flat plane, moving in the exact same direction.
Speaker 3: That is a perfect intuitive mechanical analogy. When the original
Speaker 3: vast molecular cloud began to collapse under its own gravity
Speaker 3: to form the star, it possessed a tiny inherent random rotation,
Speaker 3: just a little spin right as the cloud shrank. The
Speaker 3: conservation of angular momentum dictated that its spin must dramatically increase,
Speaker 3: just like an ice skater pulling.
Speaker 2: Their arms in, so it spins faster and faster.
Speaker 3: The majority of the mass collapse to the center to
Speaker 3: form the star, which continues to spin rapidly on a
Speaker 3: specific axis, but the remaining material, spinning too fast to
Speaker 3: fall inward flattened out into the protoplanetary disc along the
Speaker 3: star's equator.
Speaker 2: The spinning pizza dough exactly.
Speaker 3: The central stars equator and the flattened pertal planetary disk
Speaker 3: share the exact same geometric plane. Therefore, if a planet
Speaker 3: forms inside that disk through the slow bottom up accretion
Speaker 3: of pebbles and gas, it is mechanically locked.
Speaker 2: To that plane because it grew inside the dough right.
Speaker 3: It will forever orbit the star in perfect alignment with
Speaker 3: the star's equator. We see this vividly in our own
Speaker 3: Solar system, where the major planets orbit in a relatively flat,
Speaker 3: orderly plane perfectly aligned with the Sun's rotation.
Speaker 2: Okay, so if it accreedes in the disc, it must
Speaker 2: be aligned. But let me play devil's advocate for a second.
Speaker 2: Please do what if twenty nine signy Bee had formed
Speaker 2: via fragmentation if a massive chunk of gas suddenly collapsed
Speaker 2: on its own, would it still maintain that perfect alignment?
Speaker 2: Could fragmentation mimic the pizza dough?
Speaker 3: It is highly highly unlikely to produce perfect alignment. And
Speaker 3: here's why. While disc fragmentation can occur in a roughly
Speaker 3: coplanar environment, the sheer violence and scale of a fragmentation
Speaker 3: collapse introduces immense chaos into.
Speaker 2: The system, So it's disruptive.
Speaker 3: Very If the object formed from a broader fragmentation of
Speaker 3: the larger molecular cloud rather than the disc, the resulting
Speaker 3: fragment is subject to turbulent gas dynamics, magnetic field breaking,
Speaker 3: and severe gravitational interactions with other collapsing cores.
Speaker 2: It's a much messier birth.
Speaker 3: Incredibly messy. Furthermore, if a massive object forms via fragmentation
Speaker 3: at extreme distances, its orbit is highly susceptible to something
Speaker 3: called the Kosi Lidoff mechanism.
Speaker 2: What's that.
Speaker 3: It's where gravitational interactions with distant companion stars or galactic
Speaker 3: tidal forces cause the planet's orbit to wildly tilt and
Speaker 3: become highly eccentric over time. Fragmentation tends to produce orbits
Speaker 3: that are misaligned, severely tilted, or just chaotic relative to
Speaker 3: the host star's spin.
Speaker 2: So the perfect flat orderly alignment of twenty nine signy
Speaker 2: b is the ultimate mechanical hallmark of a smooth disc
Speaker 2: bound formation.
Speaker 3: Precisely when you place the evidence side by side, the
Speaker 3: conclusion is inescapable.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 3: You have the chemical evidence one hundred and fifty earth's
Speaker 3: worth of concentrated heavy elements, definitively proving the object spent
Speaker 3: millions of years vacuuming up solid material, and.
Speaker 2: You have the mechanical evidence from Chara.
Speaker 3: Right, a perfectly flat, equatorially aligned orbit, proving the object
Speaker 3: formed smoothly within the physical constraints of the flattened protoplanetary disc.
Speaker 3: Independent methodologies yielding the exact same physical reality.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the ultimate realization of this entire investigation,
Speaker 2: the redefinition of the cosmic boundary.
Speaker 3: The textbook needs an update, it does.
Speaker 2: With both the atmospheric chemistry and the orbital mechanics screaming
Speaker 2: core accretion. Astronomers are effectively forced to rethink how massive
Speaker 2: a true planet can actually get before the laws of
Speaker 2: physics breakdown.
Speaker 3: Because the historical models suggested fifteen jupiter masses was an
Speaker 3: impossible hurdle for accretion.
Speaker 2: They really thought that this could evaporate too quickly and.
Speaker 3: The pebbles shouldn't gather fast enough at those extreme distances.
Speaker 3: But William Balmer's ultimate conclusion summarizes the paradigm shift perfectly.
Speaker 3: What did he say, despite its massive size, despite its
Speaker 3: incredible distance, twenty nine signy B, in Balmer's own words,
Speaker 3: formed like a planet, and not like a star.
Speaker 2: It formed like a planet. Are it defied the computer
Speaker 2: simulations that insisted core accretion couldn't build something that massive
Speaker 2: that quickly one point five billion miles out in the dark.
Speaker 3: It did.
Speaker 2: It stands as physical proof that the universe is far
Speaker 2: more capable and perhaps far more efficient at building giant
Speaker 2: worlds from the bottom up than our models ever gave
Speaker 2: it credit for.
Speaker 3: And this realization is just the beginning.
Speaker 2: The research isn't over.
Speaker 3: Far from it. Remember, twenty nine signy B was merely
Speaker 3: the first of four specific targets in their James Web
Speaker 3: observation program. They are currently analyzing the exact same kind
Speaker 3: of infrared spectrosopic data for the remaining three objects.
Speaker 2: What are they hoping to find in the other three
Speaker 2: just more confirmation of the same thing.
Speaker 3: They are looking for, the gradient of formation. Their goal
Speaker 3: now is to actively search for compositional differences between the
Speaker 3: lower mass planets in their sample and this absolute giant,
Speaker 3: to see how they scale exactly. By systematically comparing the
Speaker 3: chemical fingerprints, the metallicities the carbon to aucy ratios across
Speaker 3: different planetary masses, they hope to glean incredibly nuanced insights
Speaker 3: into how the core cretion mechanism scales up.
Speaker 2: So they want to figure out why the models were
Speaker 2: wrong in the first place.
Speaker 3: Right does the aerodynamic drag on pebbles work differently at
Speaker 3: one point five billion miles than we thought? Is the
Speaker 3: disc much denser in its outer regions than standard models predict.
Speaker 3: The upcoming data will refine the very physics of planet formation.
Speaker 2: It is a humbling reminder that nature genuinely does not
Speaker 2: care about our neat human made categories.
Speaker 3: It really doesn't.
Speaker 2: We draw an arbitrary line on a graph and declare
Speaker 2: core cretion stops here. Planets can only get this big.
Speaker 2: Anything beyond this must be a fragmented failed star, and
Speaker 2: the universe responds by casually presenting us with twenty nine
Speaker 2: Sidney bags.
Speaker 3: It just shatters the ceiling.
Speaker 2: It does. But this raises a profound and honestly slightly
Speaker 2: unsettling question. If a planet can reach fifteen times the
Speaker 2: mass of Jupiter, gathering one hundred and fifty Earth's worth
Speaker 2: of heavy metals just by relentlessly sweeping up rock and
Speaker 2: ice in a disc, where is the actual physical ceiling?
Speaker 3: That's the big question.
Speaker 2: Is there a hard limit to this bottom up process
Speaker 2: or could the galaxy be hiding even bigger, more massively
Speaker 2: incomprehensible planets that we have completely mislabeled as brown dwarfs
Speaker 2: or small stars.
Speaker 3: That is the profound implication that has the astrophysics community
Speaker 3: buzzing right now. Really absolutely, by definitively proving that a
Speaker 3: fifteen jupiter mass object can assemble via core accretion twenty
Speaker 3: nine signi be violently kicks the door wide open. The
Speaker 3: theoretical ceiling for planetary mass has been irrevocably raised, so.
Speaker 2: It could be bigger ones out there.
Speaker 3: As Balmer's team and others utilizing the incredible power of
Speaker 3: the James Webb Space Telescope continue to map these extreme targets,
Speaker 3: we are going to define the true physical limits of
Speaker 3: planetary architecture. It opens the very real possibility that our
Speaker 3: galactic neighborhood is heavily populated with hyper massive planets, worlds
Speaker 3: of unimaginable internal pressures and scale that we previous dismisses
Speaker 3: entirely different classes of celestial objects.
Speaker 2: Just because we couldn't imagine they were.
Speaker 3: Planets exactly simply because we lacked the imagination to believe
Speaker 3: core accretion could build them. We may find ourselves totally
Speaker 3: recataloging the cosmos.
Speaker 2: It is wild to consider that we might be surrounded
Speaker 2: by absolute monsters of planetary engineering hiding in plain sight,
Speaker 2: just because we filed them in the wrong cosmic folder.
Speaker 3: It's a very exciting time for astronomy.
Speaker 2: So let's bring the journey of twenty nine signy B
Speaker 2: to a close. We started with an object sitting on
Speaker 2: the absolute razor's edge of known physics, a borderline behemoth
Speaker 2: that defied every mathematical model. We threw it a.
Speaker 4: Total puzzle, and through an incredible synthesis of human ingenuity,
Speaker 4: using an orbital observatory to capture the infrared embers of
Speaker 4: its violent birth, deciphering the spectral shadows of carbon and
Speaker 4: oxygen to reveal its heavy metal diet, and leveraging an
Speaker 4: array of earth bound mirrors to perfectly track its mechanical alignment,
Speaker 4: astronomers fundamentally solve the mystery.
Speaker 3: They took an anomaly and proved it to be the
Speaker 3: definitive champion of bottom up planet formation.
Speaker 2: An object carrying the dissolved, vaporized remains of one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty earths within its atmosphere.
Speaker 3: It is the ultimate testament to the fact that the slow, steady,
Speaker 3: seemingly humble process of gathering microscopic dust and rocks can,
Speaker 3: under the right conditions, build absolute titans.
Speaker 2: So the next time you're standing outside in the dark,
Speaker 2: looking up at the scattered points of light in the
Speaker 2: night sky, consider this. The giant worlds out there, the
Speaker 2: massive unseen objects orbiting those distant stars. They aren't all
Speaker 2: just failed stars or the results of sudden, violent gravitational collapses.
Speaker 3: Some of them are the ultimate extreme survivors.
Speaker 2: Exactly. They are the undeniable champions of the exact same
Speaker 2: humble dust gathering process that slowly, over millions of years,
Speaker 2: built the solid ground you are standing on right now.
Speaker 2: It leaves you with this lingering thought to mull Over.
Speaker 2: If a planet can grow to the staggering size of
Speaker 2: fifteen jupiters, consuming the equivalent of one hundred and fifty earths,
Speaker 2: just by patiently gathering cosmic debris in the dark, what
Speaker 2: other impossibly massive, universe breaking structures might be out there,
Speaker 2: quietly hiding a very humble, bottom up origin.