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 looking at a star system that is practically an infant,
Speaker 2: like just a few hundred thousand years.
Speaker 3: Old, right in cosmic terms, That star has barely even
Speaker 3: ignited exactly.
Speaker 2: The surrounding disk of dust and gas is still chaotic,
Speaker 2: it's hot, and it's incredibly thick, and yet orbiting incredibly
Speaker 2: close to this baby star, you see a massive, fully
Speaker 2: formed gas giant.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a planet four times the mass of Jupiter, just
Speaker 3: sitting right there in the data.
Speaker 2: According to every established law of physics, every textbook on
Speaker 2: planetary formation we have, and every mathematical model we spent
Speaker 2: the last century perfecting, that planet should not exist for
Speaker 2: another ten million years.
Speaker 3: It absolutely shouldn't.
Speaker 2: It's impossible, and yet it's there. Welcome to March twenty
Speaker 2: twenty six.
Speaker 3: It really is the ultimate paradox in modern astronomy. Right
Speaker 3: now we are staring at a cosmic impossibility that just
Speaker 3: refuses to go away.
Speaker 2: It's wild. Yeah, because for decades the astrophysical community has
Speaker 2: operated under this relatively stable paradigm regarding how solar systems
Speaker 2: actually come into being.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, the timeline was considered totally non negotiable. Building
Speaker 3: a planet, particularly a massive gas giant, is this incredibly slow,
Speaker 3: painstaking process.
Speaker 2: Right You're accumulating microscopic dust grains into pebbles, and then
Speaker 2: pebbles into boulders and eventually forming a core massive enough
Speaker 2: to sweep up a thick atmosphere exactly.
Speaker 3: So, finding a fully formed gas giant around a star
Speaker 3: this young is well, it's like walking into a delivery
Speaker 3: room and finding a newborn baby with a master's degree
Speaker 3: in astrophysics.
Speaker 2: That that is a perfect analogy. The timeline is just completely.
Speaker 3: Shattered, totally shattered.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this. We're going out to the absolute
Speaker 2: bleeding edge of current human knowledge today. We need to
Speaker 2: look exactly at what it means when an observation is
Speaker 2: officially declared to quote defy planetary formation.
Speaker 3: Which is a heavy phrase in science.
Speaker 2: It really is. So we're going to dive deep into
Speaker 2: the specific mechanics of this newly announced discovery from the
Speaker 2: Chaps based telescope.
Speaker 3: And we'll explore the shock waves this single anomalous piece
Speaker 3: of data is sending through laboratories and observatories around the
Speaker 3: globe right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and most importantly, we're going to look at why
Speaker 2: breaking the fundamental rules of the cosmos is actually the
Speaker 2: most thrilling, vital thing that can possibly happen in the
Speaker 2: scientific process.
Speaker 3: Because the scientific method really thrives on friction. When observation
Speaker 3: aligns perfectly with theory, I mean, it's comforting.
Speaker 2: Sure that it doesn't push the boundaries right.
Speaker 3: Exactly, it doesn't push our understanding at all. It's only
Speaker 3: when our map of reality completely fails to match the
Speaker 3: territory we're observing that true discovery happens.
Speaker 2: An incomplete or broken map is basically an invitation to
Speaker 2: redraw the universe.
Speaker 3: And Teops has just handed us a piece of the
Speaker 3: territory that makes absolutely no sense on our current map.
Speaker 2: So let's start by grounding this in this specific instrument
Speaker 2: that through this curveball, Because to understand the break in
Speaker 2: the rules, we really have to understand the observer.
Speaker 3: Right, the tool making the observation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the announcement that just dropped centers on data from
Speaker 2: the Characterizing Exoplanet Satellite or CHOPS CHIOPS. Yeah. And for
Speaker 2: anyone following exoplanet science, you know, CHIOPS isn't out there
Speaker 2: blindly sweeping the sky hoping to get lucky like Kepler
Speaker 2: test did.
Speaker 3: No, not at all. It is a highly specialized precision
Speaker 3: follow up mission.
Speaker 2: Right. It deliberately targets stars we already know have planets,
Speaker 2: and it measures them with a level of accuracy that
Speaker 2: is frankly hard to comprehend.
Speaker 3: That distinction is crucial. CHEOPS is not a discovery engine.
Speaker 3: It is a refinement engine.
Speaker 2: Okay, tell us about the actual hardware.
Speaker 3: Well, its primary instrument is a Richie Critian telescope feeding
Speaker 3: into a single incredibly sensitive charge couple device or CCD
Speaker 3: a CCD right, Yeah, And it operates on the principle
Speaker 3: of transit photometry.
Speaker 2: So looking for shadows.
Speaker 3: Essentially, basically, when a planet crosses the face of its
Speaker 3: host star from our line of sight, it blocks a
Speaker 3: minuscule fraction of that star's light. We are talking about
Speaker 3: measuring a dip in stellar brightness on the order of
Speaker 3: parts per million.
Speaker 2: Parts per million. I was actually looking at this supplementary
Speaker 2: data released with this announcement, and the error margins on
Speaker 2: the photometric data are insanely typed.
Speaker 3: Oh they're unbelievable.
Speaker 2: We are talking about an instrument precision of something like
Speaker 2: ten parts per million for a sun like star. To
Speaker 2: put that into perspective for you listening, that is essentially
Speaker 2: trying to measure the dimming of a car headlight in
Speaker 2: Los Angeles because a single mosquito flew in front of
Speaker 2: it while you're standing on a rooftop in New York City.
Speaker 3: That analogy perfectly captures the engineering triumph of this mission.
Speaker 3: Chi OPS achieves this precision because it operates in low
Speaker 3: Earth orbit, far above the atmospheric distortion that plagues our
Speaker 3: ground based telescopes.
Speaker 2: No twinkling stars to mess up the data exactly.
Speaker 3: Furthermore, it is deliberately defocused.
Speaker 2: Wait defocus. Why would you want a blurry telescope?
Speaker 3: It sounds counterintuitive, right, But instead of focusing the starlight
Speaker 3: into a sharp point, it spreads the light over many
Speaker 3: pixels on the detector. Oh, I see, yeah, this mitigates
Speaker 3: the effects of tiny pointing jitters from the spacecraft, and
Speaker 3: also any variations in individual pixel sensitivity. It allows for
Speaker 3: an ultra stable, ultra precise.
Speaker 2: Light curve, and the shape of that curve, like the
Speaker 2: depth of the transit, the slope of the ingress and
Speaker 2: egress as the planet enters and exits the stellar disc.
Speaker 2: That tells us the exact physical diameter of the planet
Speaker 2: relative to the star.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, But diameter alone isn't enough, which is where
Speaker 3: the broader astronomical community.
Speaker 2: Comes right, because you need more than just size.
Speaker 3: You take that incredibly precise volume measurement from SHEOPS and
Speaker 3: you combine it with the radial velocity data.
Speaker 2: That's the gravitational wobble of the host star, right.
Speaker 3: Exactly, the wobble measured by ground based spectrographs like harpsor Espresso.
Speaker 3: Radio velocity gives you the planet's mass. Mass plus volume equals.
Speaker 2: Density, and density is the holy grail.
Speaker 3: It really is. It tells you if you are looking
Speaker 3: at a fluffy cloud of hydrogen, a dense cannon ball
Speaker 3: of iron, or you know, a deep ocean world.
Speaker 2: Right, But the tension we are looking at in March
Speaker 2: twenty twenty six isn't just about what the planet is
Speaker 2: made of. It's about the fact that it exists at
Speaker 2: all in its current environment.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the real issue here, because there.
Speaker 2: Is an enormous fundamental tension right now between observational astronomy,
Speaker 2: the hard, unyielding data streaming down from shell OPS, and
Speaker 2: theoretical physics.
Speaker 3: Which provides the complex mathematical frameworks for how matter is
Speaker 3: supposed to behave in a protoplanetary disc.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Theories of planetary formation are beautiful, highly balanced equations
Speaker 2: based on thermodynamics, fluidynamics, and.
Speaker 3: Gravity, and CHELOPS has just delivered a high resolution, undeniable
Speaker 3: profile of a celestial body that the math absolutely insists
Speaker 3: is impossible.
Speaker 2: I have to push back here, though, because my first
Speaker 2: instinct and probably yours listening to this, is profound skepticism.
Speaker 2: Of course, before we throw out a century of theoretical physics,
Speaker 2: shouldn't we interrogate the machine as the possible CHOALOPS just glitched.
Speaker 3: It's the first question everyone asks.
Speaker 2: I mean, we are talking about measuring ten parts per million.
Speaker 2: Could a stray cosmic ray have hit the CCD sensor
Speaker 2: at the exact wrong.
Speaker 3: Time, or you know, could the star itself be exhibiting
Speaker 3: extreme stellar activity right.
Speaker 2: Star spots, or massive solar flares that the software pipeline
Speaker 2: misinterpreted as a planetary transit. We have seen massive false
Speaker 2: alarms in physics before.
Speaker 3: Oh. Absolutely.
Speaker 2: You think back to the BIICP two announcement about primordial
Speaker 2: gravitational waves that turned out to be galactic dust, or
Speaker 2: the faster than light neutrinos in Italy that ended up
Speaker 2: being a loose fiber optic cable.
Speaker 3: I remember that cable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so why are we so sure the telescope isn't
Speaker 2: just lying to us?
Speaker 3: What's fascinating here is that the scientific community's initial response
Speaker 3: is always exactly that ruthless stepticism.
Speaker 2: They don't just accept it.
Speaker 3: No, astronomers do not want to rewrite the foundational textbooks.
Speaker 3: It is exhausting, career upending work in modern astrophysics. A
Speaker 3: discovery of this magnitude undergoes a gauntlet of validation that
Speaker 3: is almost adversarial in nature.
Speaker 2: Adversarial I like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when the anomalus like her was first downloaded, that
Speaker 3: chief science team didn't pop champagne. They immediately assumed they
Speaker 3: had made an error, So.
Speaker 2: They essentially tried to kill their own discovery.
Speaker 3: They spent months trying to destroy their own data. They
Speaker 3: ran rigorous to trending algorithms to isolate and remove any
Speaker 3: instrumental noise.
Speaker 2: Okay, so filtering out the static, right.
Speaker 3: They factored in the thermal stability of the telescope tube.
Speaker 3: They meticulously mapped the background sky to ensure a fainter
Speaker 3: eclipsing binary star in the distance wasn't contaminating the target
Speaker 3: star's pixels.
Speaker 2: Wow, so checking for photo bombers, basically exactly.
Speaker 3: And they modeled the host star's rotation and magnetic activity
Speaker 3: to separate starspot induce light variations from a true planetary transit.
Speaker 2: That is incredibly thorough.
Speaker 3: And then they handed the raw, unprocessed data to independent
Speaker 3: rival research teams and challenged them to process it using
Speaker 3: entirely different software pipelines.
Speaker 2: And every single time the planet was still there. The
Speaker 2: anomaly survived the gauntlet.
Speaker 3: The signal remained robust across every independent analysis. The transit
Speaker 3: depth is real, the orbital period is real.
Speaker 2: Okay. Wow.
Speaker 3: The fact that the European Space Agency and the global
Speaker 3: astrophysics community are stepping up to the podium and explicitly
Speaker 3: framing this as a discovery that quote defies formation, rather
Speaker 3: than quietly cataloging it as an unresolved data anomaly. That
Speaker 3: signifies the immense weight and the highly verified nature that
Speaker 3: she ops observation.
Speaker 2: So they didn't just check the metaphorical fiber optic cable.
Speaker 2: They rebuilt the entire interpretive framework from the ground up,
Speaker 2: and the impossible planet refuses to vanish.
Speaker 3: The data is solid. It is our theories that have
Speaker 3: suddenly become incredibly fragile.
Speaker 2: That sets the states perfectly. The observation is real, the
Speaker 2: anomaly is confirmed, so that forces us to move into
Speaker 2: the actual mechanics of.
Speaker 3: The mystery, right, the physics of it all.
Speaker 2: We need to deconstruct this idea of defiance, because to
Speaker 2: understand how a cosmic law is broken, you have to
Speaker 2: really understand the intricate machinery of the law itself.
Speaker 3: You have to know the rules before you can break them.
Speaker 2: Exactly, what does it actually mean to defy planetary formation?
Speaker 2: We weren't talking about a minor discrepancy like a planet
Speaker 2: having five percent more carbon than the models predicted.
Speaker 3: No, nothing that trivial.
Speaker 2: We are talking about a fundamental contradiction of the established
Speaker 2: sequence of how matter coalesces. From the void into a macroscopic.
Speaker 3: World to appreciate the defiance. So we really have to
Speaker 3: look deeply at the rule book. For decades, the undisputed
Speaker 3: champion of planetary formation theory has been the core accretion.
Speaker 2: Model core apcretion.
Speaker 3: Okay, it's the framework that successfully explain our own Solar system.
Speaker 3: Picture a newborn star surrounded by a protoplanetary disk, a massive, spinning,
Speaker 3: flattened cloud of leftover hydrogen, helium, and microscopic dust grains.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm picturing a giant cosmic pancake around a light bulb.
Speaker 3: That works. Now, the physics of how you get from
Speaker 3: a microscopic dust grain to a gas giant like Jupiter
Speaker 3: is shockingly complex and fraught with bottlenecks.
Speaker 2: Well, it's not just gravity pulling things together from day one, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: Because dust grains are way too small for their gravity
Speaker 2: to matter exactly.
Speaker 3: In the earliest stages, gravity is completely irrelevant the dust grains,
Speaker 3: which are essentially microscopic silicates and carbon compounds. They collide
Speaker 3: purely by chance as they are carried along by the
Speaker 3: gas currents in the disk.
Speaker 2: Just bumping into each other in the dark.
Speaker 3: Right, and when they collide, they stick together through electros
Speaker 3: static forces than or Vall's forces. It is the exact
Speaker 3: same physics that causes dust bunnies to form under your bed.
Speaker 2: Okay, so cosmic dust bunnies. I can visualize that.
Speaker 3: These fractal, fluffy dust aggregates slowly grow over tens of
Speaker 3: thousands of years. They go from the size of a
Speaker 3: grain of sand to a pebble to something the size
Speaker 3: of a golf ball.
Speaker 2: But there's a massive physical hurdle they have to overcome. Here.
Speaker 2: I was reading about the meter sized barrier, which seems
Speaker 2: like the point where the entire process should theoretically just fail.
Speaker 3: Oh, the meter sized barrier is one of the most
Speaker 3: notoriously difficult problems in the core accretion model. As these
Speaker 3: clumps of dust grow to about a meter in size,
Speaker 3: like the size of a boulder, they decouple from the gas.
Speaker 2: Flow decouple, meaning they stop moving with the wind.
Speaker 3: Basically, the gas in the protoclanetary disk is supported by
Speaker 3: internal pressure, so it orbits the star slightly slower than
Speaker 3: a solid object would. Okay, Therefore, a meter sized boulder
Speaker 3: is orbiting faster than the gas around it. It experiences
Speaker 3: a constant headwind like.
Speaker 2: Riding a bike really fast on the still day, you
Speaker 2: feel the wind pushing.
Speaker 3: Back exactly and this headwind SAPs the boulder's orbital momentum,
Speaker 3: causing it to rapidly spiral inward and burn up in
Speaker 3: the host star. Mathematical models show that a meter sized
Speaker 3: rock should smiral into the star in just a few
Speaker 3: hundred years.
Speaker 2: Which is incredibly fast in astronomical terms, like the blink
Speaker 2: of an eye. So how does anything ever survive to
Speaker 2: become a planet? How do we get past that barrier?
Speaker 3: Nature requires a rapid, almost violent workaround. The current leading
Speaker 3: theory is that turbulence and eddies in the gas disk
Speaker 3: create localized pressure bumps, essentially cosmic traffic jams.
Speaker 2: Cosmic traffic jams, Okay.
Speaker 3: The boulders get trapped in these pressure bumps, accumulating in
Speaker 3: massive numbers until their collective gravitational pull finally kicks in.
Speaker 2: Huh So they gang up on the headwind.
Speaker 3: Right. This triggers a localized gravitational collapse instantly, bypassing the
Speaker 3: headwind problem and forming planet tesimals. These are solid bodies
Speaker 3: the size of use or small continents, ranging from ten
Speaker 3: to one hundred kilometers across.
Speaker 2: Okay, so now we have the building blocks. We have
Speaker 2: city sized asteroids crashing into each other. But building a
Speaker 2: rocky planet like Earth is vastly different from building a
Speaker 2: massive gas giant like Jupiter.
Speaker 3: Fundamentally different.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and location plays a critical role here. You can't
Speaker 2: just build a Jupiter anywhere.
Speaker 3: Location is everything, and it's governed by the concept of
Speaker 3: the frost line or snow line. As you move away
Speaker 3: from the intense heat of the young star, the temperature
Speaker 3: of the protoplanetary disc drops naturally at a certain distance.
Speaker 3: In our Solar System, it's roughly around the asteroid belt.
Speaker 3: It gets cold enough for volatile compounds like water, ammonia,
Speaker 3: and methane to freeze into solid ice greens, and.
Speaker 2: Ice is the game changer for building gas giants.
Speaker 3: It is the absolute catalyst. Inside the frost line, where
Speaker 3: it's too hot, planets can only be built from rocks
Speaker 3: and metals, silicates and iron, which.
Speaker 2: Are pretty rare, relatively speaking.
Speaker 3: Very rare. They comprise only about one percent of the
Speaker 3: ti total mass of the disc. That's why Earth, Venus,
Speaker 3: and Mars are relatively small. But outside the frost line,
Speaker 3: you suddenly have access to an enormous abundance of solid ice.
Speaker 2: Because all that water vapor suddenly becomes solid building material.
Speaker 3: Exactly, this provides four to five times more solid material
Speaker 3: Planetesimals outside the frost line can grow incredibly fast and
Speaker 3: incredibly massive.
Speaker 2: They enter a phase of runaway growth.
Speaker 3: Yes, once an icy rocky core reaches a critical threshold
Speaker 3: about ten times the mass of the Earth, its gravitational
Speaker 3: pull becomes so immense that it can begin to rapidly
Speaker 3: suck in the surrounding hydrogen and helium gas directly from
Speaker 3: the nebula.
Speaker 2: Just vacuuming up everything around it.
Speaker 3: This is the runaway gas accretion phase. Over the course
Speaker 3: of a few million years, this ten earth mass core
Speaker 3: sweeps up hundreds of Earth masses of gas, ballooning into
Speaker 3: a Jupiter or a Saturn.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: But here is the absolute bedrock requirement of the core
Speaker 3: accretion model. This entire process takes time. It takes at
Speaker 3: least two to five million years for the core to
Speaker 3: grow large enough to initiate runaway gas secretion.
Speaker 2: And the clock is kicking the entire time right Because
Speaker 2: the protoplanetary disc doesn't last forever.
Speaker 3: The disc is highly transient. The young host star is
Speaker 3: blasting out intense ultraviolet radiation and powerful stellar winds.
Speaker 2: So it's basically blowing away its own planetary building material exactly.
Speaker 3: This process, known as photoevaporation, is actively blowing the hydrogen
Speaker 3: and helium gas out of the system. Typically, a protoplanetary
Speaker 3: disc completely dissipates within three to ten million years.
Speaker 2: So it's a race against time, a literal race.
Speaker 3: If a planetary core doesn't reach the critical ten earth
Speaker 3: mass threshold before the gas is blown away, it fails
Speaker 3: to become a gas giant. It ends up as an
Speaker 3: ice giant like Uranus or Neptune, or just a barren rock.
Speaker 3: The timing must be perfect.
Speaker 2: Here's where it gets really interesting. We've established the unbreakable rules.
Speaker 2: You need millions of years to build the core, you
Speaker 2: need the cold temperatures beyond the frost line to get
Speaker 2: the ice to build that core quickly, and you have
Speaker 2: a strict deadline before the star bows all the gas away. Now,
Speaker 2: let's bring in the specific Sheops discovery from March twenty
Speaker 2: twenty six.
Speaker 3: This is where it all falls apart.
Speaker 2: We're looking at a host star. There is only three
Speaker 2: hundred thousand to five hundred thousand years old. It is
Speaker 2: an infant. It is still practically in a stellar womb,
Speaker 2: and yet orbiting at an incredibly close distance, well inside
Speaker 2: the frost line in a region where the temperature would
Speaker 2: vaporize any ice. Is a fully formed massive gas giant.
Speaker 3: It is a devastating contradiction. A five hundred thousand year
Speaker 3: old star should only have microscopic dust grains or perhaps
Speaker 3: a few early planetesimals swirling around it.
Speaker 2: Dust bunnies, not jupiters.
Speaker 3: Right, the gas giant we are observing has bypassed millions
Speaker 3: of years of necessary evolutionary steps. Furthermore, its location is entirely.
Speaker 2: Wrong because it's too close to the heat.
Speaker 3: Being that close to the star inside the frost line,
Speaker 3: there simply wasn't enough solid rock and metal to build
Speaker 3: the critical ten earth mass core required to capture the gas.
Speaker 3: The math does not work. You cannot build a planet
Speaker 3: of that mass in that location in that amount of
Speaker 3: time using the core accretion model.
Speaker 2: So if the established recipe is wrong, we're forced to
Speaker 2: speculate on alternative mechanisms. If it didn't form slowly from
Speaker 2: the bottom up, how did it get there?
Speaker 3: We have to look at other options.
Speaker 2: I know There is an alternative theory that often gets
Speaker 2: discussed for massive planets far away from their stars called
Speaker 2: disk instability. Could that apply here? Could a planet form
Speaker 2: top down like a star does.
Speaker 3: Disk instability is the primary alternative to core accretion, and
Speaker 3: it is certainly dominating the frantic discussions right now.
Speaker 2: How does that work?
Speaker 3: Well? In the disk instability model, you don't need to
Speaker 3: slowly build a rocky core. Instead, if the protoplanetary disk
Speaker 3: is massive enough and cold enough, a localized region of
Speaker 3: the gas can become gravitationally unstable.
Speaker 2: Like a sinkhole forming in the gas.
Speaker 3: Kind of yeah, it wrapdly, fragments and collapses in on itself,
Speaker 3: forming a massive gas giant in a matter of thousands
Speaker 3: of years rather than millions. It bypasses the pebble accretion,
Speaker 3: the meter sized barrier, and the core building entirely.
Speaker 2: It's essentially a shortcut. The gas just instantly crushes itself
Speaker 2: into a planet. But wait, you said it requires the
Speaker 2: disk to be cold enough. Yes, this chi Oups planet
Speaker 2: is sitting incredibly close to the young star. The ambient
Speaker 2: temperature from stellar irradiation would be massive. Doesn't heat prevent
Speaker 2: gas from collapsing.
Speaker 3: That is the exact friction point of this hypothesis. Thermal
Speaker 3: pressure pushes outward. For a gas cloud to collapse under
Speaker 3: its own gravity, it must be able to radiate away
Speaker 3: its heat efficiently, and.
Speaker 2: If it's next to a baby sun right.
Speaker 3: Close to a star, the stellar irradiation keeps the gas
Speaker 3: hot and pressurized, stabilizing it against collapse. Traditional disk instability
Speaker 3: models require the planet to form very far out, tens
Speaker 3: of astronomical units away in the deep freeze of the
Speaker 3: outer system.
Speaker 2: So if it formed far away via disk instability to
Speaker 2: avoid the heat, how did it end up practically touching
Speaker 2: the star?
Speaker 3: That requires invoking violent planetary migration. We have known since
Speaker 3: the discovery of the first hot jupiters in the nineteen
Speaker 3: nineties that planets do not necessarily stay where they are born.
Speaker 2: They move around.
Speaker 3: They interact gravitationally with the surrounding gas disk in a
Speaker 3: process called type two migration. A massive planet opens a
Speaker 3: gap in the disc and is essentially carried inward as
Speaker 3: the disk material accretes onto the star, like a.
Speaker 2: Surfer riding a wave towards the beach. But the timeline
Speaker 2: is still the killer right even if it formed far
Speaker 2: out via instability and surf the disk inward. Migrating takes time.
Speaker 3: It takes hundreds of thousands to millions of years to
Speaker 3: have a massive planet form via instability in the outer
Speaker 3: disk and then migrate all the way to the inner
Speaker 3: edge of the system in less than five hundred thousand years. Well,
Speaker 3: it requires a disc dynamic that is staggeringly violent.
Speaker 2: Like pinball physics.
Speaker 3: Exactly. It requires extreme orbital eccentricities, perhaps gravitational scattering with
Speaker 3: other massive unseen companions in the system that flung it
Speaker 3: in inward like a billiard ball.
Speaker 2: And what if it's not a timeline or location issue.
Speaker 2: What if we are looking at a compositional defiance. What
Speaker 2: do you mean say the host star is heavily metal poor.
Speaker 2: We know there are stars out there that are almost
Speaker 2: entirely hydrogen and helium, lacking the heavier elements like iron, silicon,
Speaker 2: and carbon. If Chiebs found a planet with a massive, dense,
Speaker 2: rocky core orbiting a star that had no rocks to give,
Speaker 2: where did the material come from?
Speaker 3: Oh, a compositional mismatch would be equally paradigm shattering. The
Speaker 3: fundamental assumption of planetary science is that a star and
Speaker 3: its planets form from the exact same primordial molecular cloud.
Speaker 2: Right, they should match, They should.
Speaker 3: Absolutely share a chemical fingerprint. If you find a heavily
Speaker 3: metallic planet around a metal poor star, you are forced
Speaker 3: to consider radical scenarios. Did the planet form in a
Speaker 3: completely different star system, get ejected as a rogue planet,
Speaker 3: wander interstellar space, and then get gravitationally captured by this
Speaker 3: young star.
Speaker 2: Capturing a row oak planet at the exact right velocity
Speaker 2: to circularize an orbit close to the star seems statistically absurd.
Speaker 3: It is incredibly improbable. Capture usually results in highly elliptical,
Speaker 3: unstable orbits. To find a circularized massive planet with a
Speaker 3: mismatched composition would suggest that rogue planets are vastly more
Speaker 3: common than we ever.
Speaker 2: Estimated, or that capturing them is easier than we.
Speaker 3: Thought, or that planetary capture mechanisms are much more efficient
Speaker 3: than our physics currently allow.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Alternatively, it might suggest that heavy elements can segregate and
Speaker 3: concentrate within a protoplanetary disk in ways fluid dynamics cannot
Speaker 3: currently explain, creating highly localized metal traps even in an
Speaker 3: otherwise impoverished disc.
Speaker 2: It is so wildly complex. If humans are intrinsically drawn
Speaker 2: to rules, we build our entire societies on predictable frameworks,
Speaker 2: and we expect the physical universe to behave the same way.
Speaker 3: We want neat little boxes for everything we really do.
Speaker 2: It gives us a profound sense of safety to look
Speaker 2: up at the night sky and think, ah ye, yes,
Speaker 2: standard core accretion is happening up there, a very orderly,
Speaker 2: predictable progression. But honestly, there is a deep, primal thrill
Speaker 2: when nature looks at our mathematical models and just flatly
Speaker 2: refuses to follow them.
Speaker 3: There is an undeniable thrill. But it's not just about
Speaker 3: the intellectual puzzle. If we step back and ask why
Speaker 3: this matters, we have to look directly in the mirror.
Speaker 3: Planetary formation models are not just abstract academic exercises. They
Speaker 3: are the foundational narrative for how we understand our own origins.
Speaker 2: Right Earth, our entire history is predicated on these rules.
Speaker 3: Everything we understand about our home, how the Earth accreted
Speaker 3: its mass, how the catastrophic impact with a Mars sized
Speaker 3: body formed the Moon, how water was delivered to the
Speaker 3: surface by volatile rich asteroids migrating inward from the outer
Speaker 3: Solar System. How our atmosphere evolved. It is all built
Speaker 3: on the bedrock of the core accretion.
Speaker 2: Model, So if the foundation is cracked.
Speaker 3: If Chiops is demonstrating that planets can form in wildly defiant, unpredictable,
Speaker 3: and accelerated ways, it forces us to confront a massive
Speaker 3: blind spot in our own history.
Speaker 2: We might be fundamentally misunderstanding the incredibly chaotic, improbable sequence
Speaker 2: of events that led to a habitable Earth exactly.
Speaker 3: We assume our Solar system is a standard blueprint. But
Speaker 3: if gas giants can form in three hundred thousand years
Speaker 3: and violently migrate inward, what does that do to the delicate,
Speaker 3: slow forming, rocky planets in the inner System?
Speaker 2: I mean, a migrating Jupiter sounds pretty destructive.
Speaker 3: A migrating gas giant acts like a cosmic wrecking ball
Speaker 3: its immense gravity with scatter planetesimals, ejecting proto earths into
Speaker 3: interstellar space or plunging them into the Sun. If rapid
Speaker 3: formation and violent migration are common, stable terrestrial planets like
Speaker 3: Earth might be far rarer than we hoped.
Speaker 2: That's a scary thought.
Speaker 3: But conversely, rapid formation might be the very mechanism that
Speaker 3: efficiently delivers the chemical precursors for life to the inner system.
Speaker 2: That is a staggering thought. If the recipe for planets
Speaker 2: is wrong, then our understanding of our own kit is
Speaker 2: fundamentally flawed, which leads us to the vast ripple effect
Speaker 2: of this March twenty twenty six discovery.
Speaker 3: The rickles are huge.
Speaker 2: You cannot simply break the laws of physics in one
Speaker 2: isolated corner of the universe and expect the rest of
Speaker 2: astrophysics to carry on with business as usual. If the
Speaker 2: fundamental recipe is wrong, then the places we expect to
Speaker 2: find planets and perhaps life itself must be entirely reevaluated.
Speaker 3: This is exactly how a single verified anomaly expands into
Speaker 3: a universal paradigm shift. When an observation like the Chiops
Speaker 3: data is confirmed, it acts as a catalyst for rapid
Speaker 3: creative chaos within the scientific community.
Speaker 2: Kas is a good word for it.
Speaker 3: The immediate aftermath is one of total destabilization. Old established
Speaker 3: models are heavily annotated with question marks.
Speaker 2: I can only imagine the scrambling happening in university physics
Speaker 2: departments right now. The frantic rewriting of grant proposals, the
Speaker 2: sudden pivot of doctoral theses. You have thousands of brilliant
Speaker 2: minds realizing the textbook they've been studying is.
Speaker 3: Obsolete absolutely, and from that chaos, wild new hypotheses are born.
Speaker 3: Theoretical physicists are being given the explicit permission to think
Speaker 3: outside the box in a way they haven't been since
Speaker 3: the discovery of the first exoplanets in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 2: They're allowed to get weird again, exactly.
Speaker 3: They are running entirely new supercomputer simulations, tweaking variables they
Speaker 3: previously assumed we're constant. They are sketching out new mechanisms
Speaker 3: for magnetic breaking, exploring the role of cosmic rays and
Speaker 3: ionizing protoplanetary disks to induce turbulence, and rethinking the hydrodynamics
Speaker 3: of gas collapse.
Speaker 2: So let's bring this down to the human level for
Speaker 2: you listening it right now, trying to make sense of
Speaker 2: our place in the cosmos. If the rules of planetary
Speaker 2: formation are completely broken, what does that mean for the
Speaker 2: ultimate question? Are planets more common than we thought or
Speaker 2: way rarer? Are we more alone in the dark, or
Speaker 2: are we surrounded by worlds we didn't even know we
Speaker 2: should be looking for.
Speaker 3: Well, if we connect this anomaly to the bigger picture
Speaker 3: of exobiology, the answer leans heavily toward a vastly more diverse,
Speaker 3: more crowded universe.
Speaker 2: Really a crowded universe.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Our entire search for extraterrestrial life, our strict definitions of
Speaker 3: the habital zone, where the Goldilock zone is heavily predicated
Speaker 3: on knowing exactly where and how planets form.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: For decades, we have been scanning the skies looking for
Speaker 3: specific types of main sequence stars at specific ages, expecting
Speaker 3: to find specific types of rocky worlds orbiting at a
Speaker 3: distance where liquid water can pool on the surface.
Speaker 2: We've been looking for Earth two point zero. We've been
Speaker 2: assuming the only way to bake a habitable planet is
Speaker 2: to use our exact Solar system as the recipe exactly.
Speaker 3: We assumed that if a star was too young, it
Speaker 3: couldn't possibly host a mature planetary system. We assumed that
Speaker 3: if a binary star system had too much overlapping gravitational turbulence,
Speaker 3: it would tear young planets apart before they could form.
Speaker 2: We assumed a lot.
Speaker 3: We assumed that regions heavily deplted of heavy metals were barren.
Speaker 2: But if Chiops proves that planets can bypass the millions
Speaker 2: of years of slow accretion, if they can form violently
Speaker 2: and rapidly, or survive in totally chaotic environments.
Speaker 3: It vastly expands the habitable real estate of the universe.
Speaker 3: It implies that worlds capable of harboring complex chemistry might
Speaker 3: exist in environments we previously dismissed as dead or impossible.
Speaker 2: We had our scientific blinders on.
Speaker 3: We really did. We assumed nature operated like a rigid
Speaker 3: factory assembly line. But chi Ops is aggressively suggesting that
Speaker 3: nature is far more improvisational.
Speaker 2: You know, it makes me think about rogue planets again.
Speaker 2: We touched on them briefly, but if planets can form
Speaker 2: via rapid disk instability, could they be ejected just as rapidly.
Speaker 3: Definitely.
Speaker 2: We've historically thought of rogue planets as tragic, frozen worlds
Speaker 2: wandering the void. But if they form quickly and get
Speaker 2: ejected while they still retain massive internal heat from their formation,
Speaker 2: or if they take a large icy moon with them, that.
Speaker 3: Is a highly active area of speculation right now. A
Speaker 3: massive rogue planet ejected from its young system would retain
Speaker 3: a tremendous amount of prim mordial heat and radioactive decay
Speaker 3: in its core, so.
Speaker 2: It brings its own heat source.
Speaker 3: Right, And if it had a moon, the tidal forces
Speaker 3: exerted by the giant planet could flex the moon's interior,
Speaker 3: generating enough frictional heat to sustain a subsurface ocean of
Speaker 3: liquid water, much like Jupiter's moon Europa. Wow, you could
Speaker 3: theoretically have a habitable environment, a thriving biosphere in a
Speaker 3: dark ocean wandering the interstellar space entirely completely decoupled from
Speaker 3: a host star.
Speaker 2: A completely starless ecosystem that sounds like sci fi, but
Speaker 2: it's grounded in this new data.
Speaker 3: Entirely possible under these revised models, and consider binary star systems.
Speaker 3: Roughly half the stars in the Milky Way are in
Speaker 3: binary or multiple star systems, two suns like Tattooine exactly
Speaker 3: The old core accretion models struggled to explain how a
Speaker 3: stable protoplanetary disc could exist long enough in a binary
Speaker 3: system to form planets. The overlapping gravity of the two
Speaker 3: stars should disrupt the disk and scatter the pebbles.
Speaker 2: So they shouldn't exist, right.
Speaker 3: But if a planet can form via a rapid localized instability.
Speaker 3: In just a few thousand years, it can essentially coalesce
Speaker 3: before the binary stars have a chance to tear the
Speaker 3: disc apart. This implies that billions of binary star systems
Speaker 3: we previously ignored might actually be teeming with planets.
Speaker 2: The possibilities for where life could emerge just multiplied exponentially
Speaker 2: because we realized our old rules were too restrictive. This
Speaker 2: perfectly transitions us to the future. We've looked at the
Speaker 2: break in the data, we've explored the complex physics of
Speaker 2: why it shouldn't exist, and we've discussed how it fundamentally
Speaker 2: alters our search for life. Now we have to look forward.
Speaker 3: What comes next?
Speaker 2: Yeah, how does science actually proceed the day after a
Speaker 2: foundational theory is shattered? What is the long term legacy
Speaker 2: of this March twenty twenty six chiops discovery going to be?
Speaker 2: Because I really believe looking back decades from now, this
Speaker 2: will be viewed as a historical turning point.
Speaker 3: It undeniably will be. And this situation really highlights the
Speaker 3: absolute beauty and rigor of the scientific method. The general
Speaker 3: public often views science as a massive, static encyclopedia of absolute.
Speaker 2: Facts which you're already figured out a.
Speaker 3: Completed jigsaw puzzle where we are just polishing the final pieces.
Speaker 3: But it is not. Science is a continuously evolving, highly
Speaker 3: dynamic model. It is a process of getting progressively less
Speaker 3: wrong over.
Speaker 2: Time less wrong. I love that phrasing. It's trips away
Speaker 2: the hubris.
Speaker 3: It is the reality of the profession. Every theory, no
Speaker 3: matter how elegant or mathematically sound, is just the best
Speaker 3: explanation we have until an observation proves it inadequate. The
Speaker 3: core accretion model was an incredible triumph of twentieth century astrophysics.
Speaker 3: It explained the data we had at the time flawlessly.
Speaker 3: But when an instrument like chiops achieves a new level
Speaker 3: of precision and makes a discovery that completely defies that understanding,
Speaker 3: it is not a failure of science.
Speaker 2: It's the opposite.
Speaker 3: It is a massive, celebrated triumph. It is the universe
Speaker 3: itself physically pointing us toward a deeper, more complex, more
Speaker 3: nuanced true truth that our previous instruments were just too
Speaker 3: blind to see.
Speaker 2: It's a paradigm shift. I think it was Thomas Kuhn
Speaker 2: who wrote about this, how science operates under a normal
Speaker 2: paradigm until anomalies build up, and then you have a
Speaker 2: sudden revolutionary crisis that forces a totally new worldview.
Speaker 3: Exactly, we are entering a Coonian crisis right now, and
Speaker 3: it is the most fertile ground for new discoveries.
Speaker 2: I think this is profoundly relatable to everyday human life. Honestly,
Speaker 2: think about your own experiences listening to this. Learning something
Speaker 2: that completely upends your personal worldview is initially overwhelming. It's
Speaker 2: deeply disorienting. It's scary if you learn something about a
Speaker 2: close friend, or your career trajectory, or a core belief
Speaker 2: about yourself that breaks your preconceived rules. It triggers a crisis.
Speaker 2: You feel unmoored. But historically, looking back, it's also the
Speaker 2: only way true growth ever happens.
Speaker 3: That's a really good point.
Speaker 2: If you never have your worldview challenged, if you never
Speaker 2: encounter data that contradicts your beliefs, you are just walking
Speaker 2: in a tight, comfortable circle. A strong nomy just stepped
Speaker 2: out of its circle.
Speaker 3: That is a profound and accurate parallel. The friction of
Speaker 3: the unknown is where growth occurs, and this raises an
Speaker 3: important question for the immediate future. What will our next
Speaker 3: generation instruments find now that CHEOPS has forced us to
Speaker 3: broaden our imaginations.
Speaker 2: This is a big guns.
Speaker 3: Yeah. We have the James Webb Space Telescope currently operating,
Speaker 3: possessing unprecedented infrared sensitivity to peer deep into the atmospheres
Speaker 3: of exoplanets. We have the upcoming extremely large telescope, the ELT,
Speaker 3: being constructed right now in the Atacama Desert in Chile,
Speaker 3: featuring a main mirror nearly forty meters across.
Speaker 2: Up until this CHIOPS announcement, observation time on those billion
Speaker 2: dollar instruments was incredibly precious and heavily influenced by our
Speaker 2: old models.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: We pointed them where the math told us to point them.
Speaker 3: We told them where to look based on what we
Speaker 3: thought was possible. If a proposal asked for a JWST
Speaker 3: time to look for a massive planet around a three
Speaker 3: hundred thousand year old star, the review committee would likely rejected.
Speaker 2: It if it would be a waste of time.
Speaker 3: Exactly citing the core accretion models that said it was
Speaker 3: a waste of expensive telescope time because nothing could be
Speaker 3: there yet.
Speaker 2: But now the leash is entirely off.
Speaker 3: The leash is off. The observational parameters have been blown
Speaker 3: wide open. We are going to start pointing the James
Speaker 3: Webb Space Telescope and the elt at regions of space
Speaker 3: we previously ignored as barn.
Speaker 2: We're going to look everywhere.
Speaker 3: We are going to intensely scrutinize the youngest, most chaotic
Speaker 3: t tory stars. We are going to look at bizarre
Speaker 3: stellar remnants, white dwarfs, and neutron stars, searching for planetary
Speaker 3: signatures that survived the death of their host stars. We
Speaker 3: are going to search for atmospheric biosignatures in extreme environments
Speaker 3: that the old textbooks would have dismissed as absurd.
Speaker 2: Because the absurd is now hard data. The absurd is
Speaker 2: on the table. Okay, let's pull all of this vast
Speaker 2: cosmic territory together. We have covered an immense amount of
Speaker 2: ground today.
Speaker 3: We really have.
Speaker 2: We started with a single startling moment in March twenty
Speaker 2: twenty six, a moment where the Chio's based telescope stared
Speaker 2: at an infant star, captured the transit of a massive
Speaker 2: planet with unbelievable precision and handed humanity, and observation that
Speaker 2: utterly and completely defied a century of planetary formation models.
Speaker 3: We examine an observation that survived every ruthless skeptical test
Speaker 3: the scientific community could throw at it. It endured the trending,
Speaker 3: the pipeline recalibrations, and the independent verifications emerging not as
Speaker 3: a glitch but as an undeniable paradigm shifting physical reality.
Speaker 2: And from that single broken roll we journeyed into the
Speaker 2: complex mechanics of how planets are born. We look at
Speaker 2: the slow, millions of years dance of core accretion, the
Speaker 2: hurdles of the meter sized barrier, and the absolute necessity
Speaker 2: of the frost line, and we saw how this single
Speaker 2: new planet shatters all those requirements, forcing us to consider
Speaker 2: wild alternatives like rapid disc instability or violent chaotic migration.
Speaker 3: We moved from the comfort of a established linear physics
Speaker 3: into the thrilling, complex chaos of the unknown. We learn
Speaker 3: that by breaking the established models, we aren't just losing
Speaker 3: a theory. We are gaining a vastly larger, more diverse universe.
Speaker 2: Exactly, we are radically expanding the potential real estate for life,
Speaker 2: realizing that habitable worlds might exist in the chaotic orbits
Speaker 2: of binary stars or the dark void of interstellar space,
Speaker 2: and we are forced to rethink the incredibly unlikely chaotic
Speaker 2: origins of our own home Earth.
Speaker 4: It really changes everything in The big takeaway here for
Speaker 4: you listening to this, absorbing all this high level astrophysics,
Speaker 4: is that being truly well informed isn't just about memorizing
Speaker 4: the established rules.
Speaker 2: It's not about having all the answers locked down in
Speaker 2: a neat, tidy box.
Speaker 3: A rigid mind is a fragile mind. Especially in science.
Speaker 2: Exactly, being truly well informed is about paying fierce, unrelenting
Speaker 2: attention when the rules get broken. It's about maintaining the
Speaker 2: intellectual flexibility to let the data surprise you, to let
Speaker 2: the universe prove you wrong, and to recognize that an
Speaker 2: incomplete map is just an invitation to explore further.
Speaker 3: It is about embracing the anomalies, because the anomalies are
Speaker 3: where the truth hides.
Speaker 2: So we want to leave you with something to chew on,
Speaker 2: something to mull over. Tonight when you step outside and
Speaker 2: look up at the vastness of the night sky. If
Speaker 2: chi Apps has proven that the fundamental, deeply established rules
Speaker 2: of how worlds are born can be totally and utterly defined, well,
Speaker 2: what other unbreakable laws of the universe are just waiting
Speaker 2: for the exact right telescope or the exact right mathematical
Speaker 2: model to prove them entirely wrong.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what else are we wrong about?
Speaker 2: Exactly? What? If the rules of the cosmos we cling
Speaker 2: to so tightly are really just local customs of our
Speaker 2: specific solar system and we're only just beginning.
Speaker 3: To travel, It makes you wonder how much of our
Speaker 3: perceived reality is just a trick of our incredibly limited
Speaker 3: perspective in space and time.
Speaker 2: It really does, because when you step out into the real,
Speaker 2: unforgiving complexity of the cosmos, you realize that comforting need
Speaker 2: for a clean, simple, binary answer is an illusion. The
Speaker 2: universe isn't a neat equation waiting to be solved. It
Speaker 2: is a wildly unpredictable, deeply creative, living mystery, and honestly
Speaker 2: wouldn't want it any other way.
Speaker 3: S