#6: Light on a feather down couch
TRANSCRIPT
Moiya McTier 0:27
Hello, and welcome to Pale Blue Pod, the astronomy podcast for people who are overwhelmed by the universe but want to be its friend.
Corinne Caputo 0:34
Yeah, it's true. I'm Corinne Caputo. I'm a comedian and writer and space enthusiast.
Moiya McTier 0:42
And I am Dr. Moiya McTier. I'm an astrophysicist and a folklorist, and someone who just really loves sharing my knowledge of space with other people. And that's what we're doing here.
Corinne Caputo 0:50
And that's why I'm here to learn a bit more.
Moiya McTier 0:54
Corinne, where are we recording today?
Corinne Caputo 0:56
Okay, we are recording today on my parents' incredible couch, which is many years old. But it's like that homey feeling of like the holidays, and we're back. And the cushions are really comfy and soft, but they are full of it's like a down insert, I think which means we're gonna get super sleepy soon. It's just how it works. But I think we could get some good knowledge in before we pass out. Yeah,
Moiya McTier 1:20
me too. I can see the the fun little like feather ends poking up through the cushions. And, you know, those are sharp, but it's also part of the experience, like I'm really happy
Corinne Caputo 1:29
and the sharp surprise, but it's just part of it, and you get the reward of a feather. What?
Moiya McTier 1:34
Exactly? Like, oh, a little bit of discomfort, but then it tells you that there is there's magic there.
Corinne Caputo 1:40
Exactly, exactly.
Moiya McTier 1:43
So while we're on your parents couch, we are going to be discussing a pretty important topic in astronomy is something that actually the entire field of astronomy is built on. Like if this thing didn't exist, we would not have astrophysicists, I would have a very different job. I don't know what I'd be doing. But today, we're talking about the electromagnetic spectrum. Corinne, when I say electromagnetic spectrum, like what comes to mind? Do you know what that is?
Corinne Caputo 2:15
I think I do. I think it's like that rainbow image of kind of like a long rectangle. And it's like, all the colors and there's, there's like, kind of like sound wave stuff going on on top. I couldn't decipher one if I saw it, but I think I would recognize what it is. Yeah, yeah,
Moiya McTier 2:31
those those waves that you see on top, they are light waves, not sound waves. They Yeah, there is that rainbow block that you'll see. And that's the that represents a very specific part of the electromagnetic spectrum. But there's also stuff on either side of that rainbow block. And we are going to be talking about all of it today. This is actually so as I prepare for these episodes, I write down notes. And my notes for this episode are longer than any other episode notes we've had so far. So we're gonna have a great time is what I'm saying.
Corinne Caputo 3:04
Yeah, we'll have to finish get this in before we fall asleep. So let's, yeah.
Moiya McTier 3:09
Okay, so let me snuggle a little bit further into the cushions. I really want to make sure I leave a footprint when I leave. Yeah, yeah, you better. So let's, I think start with the basics. Like if you're talking about the electromagnetic spectrum, which is the spectrum of light, we have to first ask the question, what
Corinne Caputo 3:28
is light? Ooh, what is light?
Moiya McTier 3:31
So I think a lot of people might get uncomfortable around around this idea, because it's kind of it's kind of a weird, abstract concept to grasp. But light is both a particle and a wave. The particles of light are called photons. And together photons or packets of photons can act as a wave. And I think that you don't have to let yourself get all caught up in this. You know, like, as humans, we understand that waves of water are made up of individual water droplets and individual h2o molecules, like let's think of light in a very similar way. Okay, that makes sense. So the fact that light is both a particle and a wave, is that idea is called wave particle duality. And it was officially discovered in 1924 by, again, the names a man, a scientist named Louis de Broglie, or Louie de Broly. I'm not sure he was French, maybe it was in my teens. I know that. And he was trying to understand how electrons behave. Electrons, just like photons are fundamental particles of the universe. So he realized that not just electrons, but all particles can act as waves, even particles of light and this helped pave the way for quantum theory which we are not going to get too deep into today. But quantum theory tells us like how do particles interact with each other? How do they behave? How are they formed? And we can thank our modern understanding of quantum theory in part to Louis de Broglie. But he was by no means the first or the last person to be thinking about wave particle duality. Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein were both dabbling with Wave duality for a while. Newton going back to the 1600s was doing some fun experiments with light. Einstein was doing some fun experiments with light when he was thinking through his theories of relativity, but yeah, DeBroglie is the one who gets the credit for this wave particle duality. Cool. Perhaps the best evidence that we have for this duality of light comes from a very famous physics experiment called the double slit experiment, which was first done by a man named Thomas Young. Corinne, I'm wondering if you can guess maybe not the exact year but like when abouts Do you think the double slit experiment was done for the first time?
Corinne Caputo 6:05
Um, okay, tough because I hate the name double slit experiment. So maybe I want to hope it was done long, long ago. But if this was just or kind of, if Louie did his stuff in 1924, maybe this happened in 1944.
Moiya McTier 6:24
Oh, interesting. You think the slit experiment came after? Oh, duality work?
Corinne Caputo 6:28
It was much I guess it wouldn't make sense. Yeah,
Moiya McTier 6:30
it was it was way before way before.
Corinne Caputo 6:33
This is proving how quickly my brain falls apart. You
Moiya McTier 6:37
know, you it's, it's not your fault. You're on a comfy couch like you're doing better than anyone can expect.
Corinne Caputo 6:43
I think this happened in five BC.
Moiya McTier 6:47
Okay, maybe not quite that far back. The first double slit experiment was done by Thomas Young in 1801. A lot earlier than you would expect. And wrong. We've done this experiment. So many times since I did it as a college student. I did the experiment. And then I also had to do the math to explain what was happening in the experiment, which was not as fun as doing the actual experiment. Yeah,
Corinne Caputo 7:11
I'm sure. It's always the lab days in school, like an elementary middle school are always way more fun than like sitting in lecture stuff. And it always felt like a mini field trip.
Moiya McTier 7:23
So So light is a form of energy that exists in both a wave and a particle form. That particle is called a photon. And photons get created anytime an electron loses energy in its atom by dropping to a lower energy level. So if you have that, that image of an atom in your mind of the nucleus at the center with all the protons and the neutrons, and then around that nucleus, there's a cloud of electrons. But those electrons orbit on specific energy levels. And they can have all sorts of different configurations, especially as you get up to bigger atoms that have like 80 electrons orbiting around them. That seems like chaos. It is kind of chaotic. When you get down to the atomic level, when you get down to the quantum level, like things. It gets weird down there. So every time and electron essentially is like, I'm tired, I'm going to drop to a lower energy level, a photon immediately gets produced with the exact same amount of energy that the electron
Corinne Caputo 8:29
lost. Oh, okay, so it's like a perfect balance. Exactly, yeah,
Moiya McTier 8:32
because one of the big rules of the universe is that matter and energy can not be destroyed, or like created from nothing. So if you have an electron losing energy, that energy has to go somewhere, and the universe has decided to put that energy in the form of a photon. Okay? So lots of things can make electrons jump to a lower energy level, it can happen through a chemical reaction, like fire, you know, fire produces photons, it can happen in the cores of stars, when they are fusing elements into each other, those electrons get smushed together, and they will jostle around in their energy fields, and that will produce a lot of photons. Even if you have an electron just moving through an electric or magnetic field that will produce photons. And it can also happen just like spontaneously, like, there are people who study like, How often do electrons just spontaneously jump to lower energy levels, and that can happen it's really fun. And the reverse is true. Also, if an electron gets hit by a photon, if it gets like injected with the energy of a photon, that electron will go up in energy levels. Okay. So it works both ways. Sure, sure. And remember, I said that there are so many different configurations that are possible for electrons around their atoms because of that. There are lots of of like, specific If ik amounts of energy that an electron can drop, which means there are lots of specific amounts of energy that a photon can have. Okay, if that makes sense? Sure. I have no idea. Okay. Well, I, I said that every time an electron loses energy, a photon is created with the exact same amount of energy lost, right? So if an electron is jumping from like level three to level two, that's only going to produce a small amount of energy and the photon produced will be a low energy photon. But if an electron is jumping from like level 50 to level two, you're losing a lot of energy and the photon produced will have a lot of energy to it. Got it? Okay. Yes, that makes sense. So there is a range of potential photon energies. Or you could say that they exist on a spectrum.
Corinne Caputo 10:49
There it is.
Moiya McTier 10:51
It took us 11 minutes to get there. But we finally said the word spectrum. So we did not discover this electromagnetic spectrum all at once. It happened slowly, over time, as we discovered different regions of the spectrum. But humans could tell for a long time that light was interesting. You know, we saw rainbows. When the sunlight would pass through clouds or water vapor, we can see light getting diffracted or like, bounced around through water or through glass. Like, even if you don't have advanced scientific instruments, you can tell that there's something cool about light. Yeah, so an early experiment that was done in 1800, by William Herschel actually looked at how light splits up into different colors. You know, they saw rainbows, and they had invented prisms. So they had tools that could take light from the sun and split it up into the different colors of the rainbow. Herschel did this experiment where he set up a prism had the light from outside passing through it so that it split up into the colors. And he put a thermometer in each of the bands of different colors. Oh, sure. Okay. Because he wanted to see if like, the red light was a different temperature than the blue light. And it was, but like a really cool thing he did. That shocked a lot of people was he put a thermometer, like to the side of the red band, you know, where there wasn't a colored band, but he measured that temperature anyway. And he was probably trying to do it as some sort of control. Like, if I put the thermometer here, then that's going to be the temperature of the room or somewhere. Yeah, but it wasn't because he was placing his thermometer in the place where the infrared light was landing on. Oh, I see. It was just he couldn't see it. He couldn't see it. Yeah. And so he noticed that, that that empty space, where he put the thermometer was hotter than the the red band of light. And so in 1800, William Herschel discovered infrared light, which was really cool. And he set off this cascade of discovery. So a year later, a scientist named Johann Ritter tried to do the same thing. But on the opposite end, he put a thermometer like above the, the purple band, and he discovered ultraviolet light. And then like a few decades later, in 1867, James Maxwell, who like literally wrote the equations that describe how light electricity and magnetism are related, they're called Maxwell's equations, and we will probably do an episode about them at some point. Really cool. So in 1867, James Maxwell hypothesized that if there is this infrared region of the spectrum, right outside of what we can see, there's probably stuff beyond that too. And then 20 years later, like at 97, no, 1887, I can do math. Well, I can't so well, at least one of us can. The the Maxwell hypothesis of there being more wavelengths of light was proven by a man named Heinrich Hertz, Heinrich Heinrich, and he discovered microwaves and radio waves, which are both longer and less energetic than infrared radiation. And so then for the next like, few decades, people were trying to discover the other regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. A lot of them were discovered by accident. But I think it is important before I talk about the actual regions of the spectrum to tell you about how we scientists label them. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So we can talk about Photon energy in terms of wavelength or frequency. Both of these terms rely on light acting as a wave. So the the wavelength is given in units of length, like nanometers, or centimeters or meters or whatever. And if you picture a wave, the wave length is the distance between two peaks right next to each other. Okay? Yes,
Corinne Caputo 14:57
I remember that.
Moiya McTier 14:58
Yeah, like view ceilings. Sure, yeah. The other way to talk about the different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum is to use a unit of frequency. And we actually have assigned frequency the unit of Hertz. That's the unit that we came up with named after Heinrich Hertz, soundproof of microwaves. And radio waves, frequency tells you how often a light wave will pass its peak. So if the wavelength is distance between peaks, then the frequency is like, how often if I were standing in one place, and the wave was going by me how often what I see a new peak, okay, sure. Yeah, and technically, the, the unit of hertz is like one over it's the inverse of seconds. It's the inverse of time, in case that means anything to you. But a good way to think of this is that longer wavelengths equals lower frequency equals less energy. Okay,
Corinne Caputo 15:56
yeah, I'm picturing me and these long that the longer the wavelength. It just feels like slower between them. Like I can kind of visualize exactly that. Yeah,
Moiya McTier 16:06
exactly. Good. I tend to be more comfortable thinking in terms of wavelength. But I have a lot of colleagues who are much more comfortable using hertz and talking in terms of frequency. So I'll probably stick to wavelength in this episode, because I think it's more intuitive. Actually, the frequency, you don't have to do that weird, like inverted time thing in your head totally. But if you want to practice your conversions, there is a very easy way to convert between wavelength and frequency. Using a simple formula. The wavelength equals the speed of light divided by the frequency of the wave.
Corinne Caputo 16:41
Okay? Yeah. Simple if you've got a calculator, exactly.
Moiya McTier 16:47
Just some quick bounce here, the most energetic highest frequency part of the spectrum is called the gamma ray region, the wavelengths There are nine times 10 to the minus 12 meters. So they are 1,000,000,000,000th of a meter. Whoa, okay. Yeah. Very small, very energetic. Uh huh. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we have radio waves, and they are anything longer than 30 centimeters
Corinne Caputo 17:18
length. Okay. Wow, those are very different lengths.
Moiya McTier 17:21
I know, it's a huge spectrum. This is why I really wanted to emphasize at the beginning, like there are so many ways for electron clouds to be configured. So there are so many different like discrete energies that a photon can have. It ranges so widely. It is very important as astronomers to observe the universe in the whole electromagnetic spectrum. Because some objects are best seen at different wavelengths. There's this analogy that I really love that compares studying the universe to listening to an orchestra. Looking at the universe with all of the wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. It lets you see all of the different things just like listening to an orchestra lets you hear all of the different instruments acting as one. But if you were to observe the Universe in just one wavelength, if you were only looking in, in the infrared, for example, that's like going to an orchestra and only hearing the clarinet section. I
Corinne Caputo 18:19
just saw the movie tar so this is that really resonates.
Moiya McTier 18:23
Tar is
Corinne Caputo 18:24
the Cate Blanchett it's like movie where she plays a conductor and she's just made up character named Lydia tar and it's, I loved it. I am not the type to sit through anything long. And I always fall asleep during the movie and this one, I really listened.
Moiya McTier 18:39
Oh, my, what was it like? Why? Because it didn't even have hobbits or dry.
Corinne Caputo 18:45
Real life, it was very normal. About this woman, Lydia Tarr, who's this iconic conductor in the world of this movie. And it opens with her at like a New Yorker talk. And she basically gets like called out for potentially grooming. Let I'm saying allegedly grooming as if she's a real person coming like female students. You should see it. I loved it. I love the ending specifically anyway, now I'm an expert in orchestras. Yes,
Moiya McTier 19:16
you're an expert in orchestras. And soon you will also be an expert in the electromagnetic spectrum. And in order to do that, I think that I need to take you on a journey through the electromagnetic spectrum from the most energetic waves to the least energetic waves. We are going to go on a little romp through the rainbow. That's what we're doing. I
Corinne Caputo 19:35
love that a romp through the rainbow.
Moiya McTier 19:39
Okay, starting with gamma rays. They're fast so fast. They're so small. They were first discovered or observed in 1900 by a scientist named Paul V yard. Thank you Paul V ARD was studying radiation from the element radium. But it wasn't named by Paul V yard. This region of the spectrum was actually named by Ernest Rutherford, a few years later. Rutherford is perhaps best known in the science community for giving us the structure of an atom with like the nucleus in the center and the cloud of electrons.
Corinne Caputo 20:24
Maybe the name sounds familiar, and maybe it's from that large atom project I had in sixth grade. We built one
Moiya McTier 20:31
honestly, probably, yeah. I would not be surprised. So the gamma rays will have wavelengths of from 1,000,000,000,000th of a meter. Oh, my gosh, on average, all the way up to like, point one nanometers, which is, like 100,000,000th of a meter? I don't know. It's a very small also
Corinne Caputo 20:57
still small, still too small. Yeah,
Moiya McTier 21:00
I could give you numbers. But at this size, the numbers aren't really
Corinne Caputo 21:05
it's kind of meaningless to me. Yeah. Like I you should just
Moiya McTier 21:09
here, very, very small. Yeah, whenever I say a number, that's the kind of thing. Gamma rays can be produced naturally on Earth, most of the time that happens through radioactive decay. So if you have a radioactive element or isotope like uranium, that element will decay, which means it will break down into like smaller particles, and one of the particles that it will produce is a gamma ray photon. These rays are also the byproduct of a lot of nuclear reactions. And they are found in space around extremely high energy events. But even more high energy than a supernova explosion, like we've observed these events that we call gamma ray bursts. And it's still kind of a mystery of what forms them but it is extremely energetic explosions and collisions, where they just have this very short burst of energy of gamma energy.
Corinne Caputo 22:06
Oh, my God. And we don't know why. Well, we've
Moiya McTier 22:10
never been able to observe one in real time, because they're so short share is the problem. Wow. And so in our last episode, we talked about the Vera Rubin Observatory, or formerly known as the LSST. And that should help us understand transients in the sky. These these objects that appear right sometimes, but then are gone. I remember you saying that, yeah. So hopefully, this Vera Rubin observatory will help us understand gamma ray bursts. Let's
Corinne Caputo 22:39
finish it up.
Moiya McTier 22:44
Gamma rays have this really annoying, but cool quality. They are so small, and so energetic, that they can penetrate pretty much any dense object. So X rays when you take an x ray image of your body that works because the X rays will go through your skin, but they won't go through your bones, right. But gamma rays will go through your
bones. Oh, spooky, spooky.
Yeah, so they'll pass right through your bones and right through your organs. But weirdly enough, they have a hard time passing through our atmosphere. It's like they're they are so small, that they are actually smaller than other particles in our atmosphere. And they they are smaller than the distance between particles. So if a gamma ray tries to get through our atmosphere, it just gets bounced around too much and doesn't reach the ground.
Corinne Caputo 23:37
Oh, wow. Okay, it gets kind of kicked around. Yeah. Which
Moiya McTier 23:42
means we can't really do gamma ray observations from the ground, we have to put them put these gamma ray telescopes on balloons or aircraft, or we have to just send them up into space. So I guess the most active gamma ray telescope right now is NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope, which was launched in 2008. And was only supposed to work for a couple years. And now here it is 2022. And it's still kicking in.
Corinne Caputo 24:09
I love hearing that I love those little surprises in space,
Moiya McTier 24:14
a lot of telescopes, do that actually outlive their projected lifespan. So many
Corinne Caputo 24:19
is that because we're just really under estimating, or we're just like, because we're trying
Moiya McTier 24:24
to be very conservative. I
Corinne Caputo 24:25
was gonna say it's a conservative mindset. Good. We should continue that. Because I love the surprise.
Moiya McTier 24:32
It's a pleasant surprise. Yeah.
You know, expect the worst and then you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Corinne Caputo 24:39
It's an under promise and over deliver mindset. And that is what we should all be doing. No, actually, no, that's killed. capitalists don't do that. That's
Moiya McTier 24:48
also true. You're working. Let's leave that sort of productivity to the telescope. Yeah, like to the actual machines,
Corinne Caputo 24:54
the machines can do it.
Moiya McTier 24:57
So that concludes our brief tour. of the gamma ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum. And now we're moving on to X rays, which were discovered by Vilhelm Rankin I took German for four years in high school so I can do the German name so that one's right. Yeah, it has one of those uhm welts over the Oh Vilhelm rune skin. Discovered X rays by accident in 1895. And he called the energy that he discovered x because he didn't know what it was. And they didn't even know that it was a kind of light. It was confirmed in 1912 Whoa, what, 17 years later that it was actually a form of light. What did
Corinne Caputo 25:38
he think it was? Just like, like an energy? Uh huh. Or something? Sure. Yeah.
Moiya McTier 25:44
This is a part a time in our history when, you know, like we weren't that far removed from philosophers and ALCHEMIST talking about or Yeah, totally, like, the balance between force and energy and like, spectrums. Like we it was all kind of blurry. Yeah. Didn't have the the rigid delineations that we have now. Yeah,
Corinne Caputo 26:07
you could almost still write it off as like, Zeus.
Moiya McTier 26:13
It's just, it's just the gods. Yeah,
Corinne Caputo 26:14
that's it that you can see through someone's body. Exactly. You just take a look at the bones because the gods wanted us to
Moiya McTier 26:20
up. Obviously, Zeus wants everyone to be able to see their bone. Yeah. How else would we know who the best sacrifices to him would be? Oh
Corinne Caputo 26:28
my god, this is gonna make everything easier.
Moiya McTier 26:32
Yeah, so they didn't realize it was light until 1912 1912. A big year. Titanic. Oh my gosh. And we discovered X ray light years.
Corinne Caputo 26:41
Oh, right. Wow, a lot to do the newspapers.
Moiya McTier 26:46
They must have been so busy. Oh, my God. Extra Extra read all about this energy that we don't know what it is. The wavelength range for X rays span from point one to 10 nanometers. one nanometer is a millionth of a meter. Okay. Yeah, so it goes from like, a 10th of a millionth of a meter to 10 millionths of a meter. Okay,
Corinne Caputo 27:15
I think that that number makes sense. We'll see.
Moiya McTier 27:21
Look, these orders of magnitudes are difficult to to like do and yeah, in your head quickly. We can make X rays on Earth by running electrons through a tube and smashing it into an element like tungsten or copper. And we have been doing that for a really long time. When Rankin discovered the X ray he was doing something similar he was like working with these vacuum tubes and throwing electrons at elements and having a great time in space. They are produced by very hot objects and when I say hot I mean millions of degrees.
Corinne Caputo 27:57
Oh my god. Okay.
Moiya McTier 27:59
Yeah, and that's in Celsius but also like in Fahrenheit once
Corinne Caputo 28:05
Yeah, when it's that hot. I don't like me and it matters as much exactly
Moiya McTier 28:09
like it's, it's very hot. So by very hot very energetic objects and phenomena like supernovae, pulsars, which are leftover after some supernova explosions and the the accretion disks around black holes so like the the disk of material that is slowly falling into the black hole will produce x rays because it gets very hot around the black hole as all that stuff rubs together so
Corinne Caputo 28:37
X rays are hot but they do not appear when something is hot.
Moiya McTier 28:43
They appear when something is a very hot yeah, I know you're thinking about infrared stuff. Okay, yeah,
Corinne Caputo 28:50
we'll get there Okay, okay. I'm thinking of X rays and I got I went to a new dentist and they took x rays for I want to say an hour it was like just taking picture after picture after picture. Now I'm thinking they were running some kind of insurance scam where they could build a lot of X rays. But if you want to see every kind of my teeth from every angle, I can show him
Moiya McTier 29:16
okay I remember growing up hearing that you had to log all the amount of time you spent in an x ray machine because if you got too much exposure to X rays then like bad things would happen. Well
Corinne Caputo 29:32
if that's never done that I haven't logged it once
Moiya McTier 29:36
you said an hour and I was like damn like that's that's gonna go in your law. It couldn't
Corinne Caputo 29:40
got it. Maybe it was too long. I was in like the lead vest but it was it was certainly like they were really taken a thorough baseline of my teeth. Just want to know all the nooks and crannies. Yeah, I was like, Okay, fine. Didn't I just do this a year ago or whatever?
Moiya McTier 29:56
Wow, hats off to you for going to the dentist that often.
Corinne Caputo 29:58
I also had no point I'm in this morning, but I cancelled so I'm not all good. Okay, well
Moiya McTier 30:02
before my last dentist appointment, which was I believe in 2020. I have not been to the dentist for 10 years.
Corinne Caputo 30:09
I get it, I totally get it. Yeah, this is the best time to go back under the guise of COVID. Because you're like, Ah, sorry, I had like it's been COVID I haven't had time to make an appointment.
Moiya McTier 30:20
Sometimes we really should use COVID to
Corinne Caputo 30:22
art and yeah, and that's the only time
Moiya McTier 30:25
so like gamma rays, X rays get bounced around in our atmosphere. They are slightly larger than gamma rays, but still small enough to get bounced around the particles in our air so they don't reach the ground. And we also have to send stuff into space to study X rays. So the the, I think most well known and most widely used x ray telescope is the xmm Newton Observatory, which was launched by the European Space Agency in 1999. And is still going strong,
Corinne Caputo 30:58
and one of the last 90s Babies Wow, they were really trusting that the y2k wasn't going to end the world. Unlike me and Staten Island who was confident the world was
Moiya McTier 31:11
What did you do to prepare for the end of the world?
Corinne Caputo 31:14
Oh, I made a dance that was like just about how we're all going to die in the y2k because I think I thought that was funny, but I actually maybe it's growing up Catholic, but the apocalypse mindset is so tempting to me and like so I was so into it. Like, can you imagine? Anyway, I don't.
Moiya McTier 31:33
I can. I can imagine Shopian I've kind of felt like we were living in an apocalypse for the last couple of years. Yeah,
Corinne Caputo 31:41
I get that completely.
Moiya McTier 31:49
Hey, it's Moiya. And I wanted to give a quick shout out to our amazing patrons who are keeping Pale Blue Pod going. First off, I want to thank our latest pre-main sequence stars Leanne Catherine Fraser ala Walker, Danielle Mariano and Emma Pharrell. Know that even though you're not fusing hydrogen into helium in your cores, you are still providing a fantastic service to us and to the universe. So thank you. Also, thank you to our latest Red Dwarf or M dwarf stars. We know we can't see any of you with our naked eyes and the night sky but we know you're there doing so much of the the illuminating and warming labor in the universe. So thank you to Ken and Cookie and Aima. And, as always, because they get thanked every episode, thank you so much to our sunlike stars, Siân Llewellyn and Finn, it is absolutely amazing that your habitable zone just happens to be where our planet is orbiting around you to. So thank you again, and you listener can support us hear your name on this pod get access to director's commentary for every episode, and make it to our patrons star chart. By supporting us on Patreon, you can find the star chart, Patreon info and more at our website palebluepod[dot]com. Or you can just go straight to the source and support us on patreon[dot]com/palebluepod. And remember, the first 50 people to sign up to support us on Patreon will be eligible to receive a signed and personalized copy of my book, The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy. So thank you again to our patrons. And I would love to say your name on this show. So go to patreon[dot]com/palebluepod.
Corinne Caputo 33:26
Hey, it's Corinne, I wanted to quickly tell you about an incredible new offering from Multitude—classes! People say that podcasting is easy, but then no one actually explains how to get one going or how to grow or how to avoid, you know all the pitfalls that could stop your project immediately. And that's why for the first time Multitude is offering classes for podcasters by podcasters. You'll learn from weekly instruction, hands on homework, lots of valuable feedback from your instructor and classmates in the online classroom. They're starting out with three classes in the first round. First Sustainable Podcasting: Creating a Structure and Workflow So Your Show Works With You by Eric Silver, Podcast Mixing and Mastering for Non-Engineers by Brandon Grugle, a class I think I should take, and then How to Make a Living as a Digital Creator by Amanda McLoughlin. Now these are an amazing gift for aspiring podcasters in your life and also a way for you to kick off 2023 by working on a new project. Learn more about the dates, curriculum technical details, or just register today by going to multitude[dot]productions/classes. Or check out the post on Multitude's social media feeds.
Moiya McTier 34:32
Listening to Pale Blue Pod is a great way to learn about astronomy concepts, but it's no secret that we're not here to make you better at math. If that's the type of thing you're after. I'd like to recommend Brilliant. Brilliant is a program online and in app form for lifelong learners that replaces lecture videos with hands on interactive lessons. You can learn about the complementary angles in a triangle by actually stretching out a triangle on your screen. In to see the angles change in real time. And you can learn about the center of mass and physics by trying to balance a weighted beam on your digital finger. Those are just a couple of examples. Brilliant has 1000s of lessons in math, scientific thinking and even computer algorithms, and they add new ones every single month. I think that the world really needs more people who can use knowledge and logic to reason through problems. And Brilliant is the best way to practice those skills online interactively. To get started for free, visit brilliant[dot]org/palebluepod or click on the link in the description, the first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription. Again, you can join brilliant for free at brilliant[dot]org/palebluepod or the link in the description. And come on have a good time getting smarter.
So the next region that we have to talk about is the ultraviolet region or the UV region
Corinne Caputo 36:01
VI, I know it from skincare.
Moiya McTier 36:04
Yes, exactly. There are multiple, like categories of UV light, there's UV, a UVB and UVC. And like some of them are one of them is supposed to be like really bad for your skin. But I don't, I never remember which I think UVA
Corinne Caputo 36:19
and UVB and probably the other one too.
Moiya McTier 36:22
But the cool thing, a little spoiler, our atmosphere also blocks a lot of UV light from the sun, not all of it. But enough that we usually don't have to deal with dangerous UV levels. Yes. So the wavelength range here, a UV light can range from 10 to 400 nanometers in wavelength. So it's just smaller than the wavelengths that we can see with our human eyes. You can make UV photons by passing a stream of electrons through a gas like mercury, our sun also provides a lot of UV radiation. In fact, most stars give off a lot of UV radiation. And the like the the processes of creating a star of forming a star from scratch produce a lot of X rays. So we often will use UV light to study star forming regions. because it lets us see like maybe stars
Corinne Caputo 37:22
are doing that makes sense. I get that.
Moiya McTier 37:25
Some animals can see in the ultraviolet, some birds, some reptiles and bees can see them. And I remember seeing this really fun documentary that used a UV camera to look at flowers to see what bees would see. It's very cool. I will absolutely be putting that in the director's
Corinne Caputo 37:43
notes. Yes, I'd have the UV flashlight. Oh, wait, is that just like a black light? I guess so. It must be because everything's white glowed?
Moiya McTier 37:54
Yeah, yeah, that's, that's a black light.
Corinne Caputo 37:57
I ran a summer camp a few years ago. And one of the like, sciency experiments we did was like we made glow in the dark jello, which like glow when you showed a black light on it. And really what you do is you put a little bit of tonic water in when you make JellO. Oh, so cuz tonic. Yeah, goes under black light. So yeah, it tasted disgusting. And the kids loved it.
Moiya McTier 38:21
Those two things usually fall into usually,
Corinne Caputo 38:24
those things usually I should have guessed. I was like, these are good. The kids are gonna hate this. And then there's like, they were all gone.
Moiya McTier 38:29
I forgot that tonic water was up like I forgot that there were normal things you could consume that glowed under black light comes lately. Do you still eat this jello? Well, I
Corinne Caputo 38:38
fed it to children.
Moiya McTier 38:40
So you hope so? So you gotta for the, for the legal sake of this podcast? Yes, they can. There are a lot of telescopes that see in the UV because it's so close to the visible region of the spectrum. But Hubble the Hubble spacecraft can see in the UV, and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, which was launched by NASA in 2003, primarily looks in the ultraviolet. The next range, I'm going to try and get through through this one as quickly as I can, because it already gets too much attention is the visible or optical region of the electromagnetic spectrum. It spans from 400 to 750 ish nanometers. And honestly, this is my hot take about the visual region of the spectrum. I don't think it would have its own region if we didn't happen to see in this part of the spectrum because like, why, why should it it's not special. I feel like it shouldn't just get absorbed into UV and infrared. It shouldn't be its own thing. The only reason it is is because we have evolved. Yeah, because we evolved to see this because this is the part of the spectrum where our Sun has its peak and its energy.
Corinne Caputo 39:49
Ah, okay. Is it a coincidence that we can see it that like we evolved to see it that
Moiya McTier 39:54
way? Right. We evolved to see it because that's what most of the light coming to our planet was the best biggest downside to optical observation is that you have to do it at night because the sun gives off a shit ton of visible or optical light. So you have to wait until the sun is on the other side of the planet from your telescope, if you want to look at the night sky. Well, I guess you can also observe the sun in the in the optical True.
Corinne Caputo 40:19
True. Yeah. So you really have to be a night owl to be an astronomer to
Moiya McTier 40:23
be a visible astronomer. Yeah.
Corinne Caputo 40:27
No, thanks. Thank you. Yeah,
Moiya McTier 40:30
but you've all of the other ones, you can do pretty much at any time love that. There's, it doesn't it gets too much attention. So I'm moving on, I refuse this. Okay, if you say anything else, now, the infrared part of the spectrum goes from roughly 750 nanometers to 1000 nanometers or one millimeter. And that's so short, I feel like we really could just absorb the region of the spectrum, which shall not be named into the red and give it a larger range. Sure, sure. But, but this is one of the most useful regions of the spectrum. Whenever you are using a remote control, or a thermal imaging camera or electric heaters, you are taking advantage of infrared. Wow.
Corinne Caputo 41:16
Okay, now this is my favorite one.
Moiya McTier 41:17
I know, it's pretty good. Scientists can use infrared telescopes to learn about the changing temperatures on Earth. So they do actually point telescopes back at the earth to help us, you know, keep track of climate change. Yeah,
Corinne Caputo 41:31
it's good to get a bird's eye view of what's going on. Yeah.
Moiya McTier 41:35
I tend to think of IR, the infrared region as the heat region of the spectrum. And you were saying earlier, you started to say that to that when you think of, of infrared, you think of heat because of the thermal imaging cameras. Yeah. But really, that doesn't make much sense, because the very hot things will produce more energetic photons. But it's only things that are like warm or hot on human scales. Yeah, that produce the infrared. Totally, yeah. Okay. infrared observations tell us a lot of really cool things about space, they can tell us about objects that are too cold to emit in the region of the spectrum, which shall not be named, like planets, because they aren't producing their own light most of the time, or very small stars that are kind of cool and dim, or just like clouds of gas, these nebulae that we see out there in space. And these long wavelengths are perfect for cutting through dust, and there's dust everywhere in the
Corinne Caputo 42:36
galaxy, there is dust everywhere in my apartment. Well, Carinya apartments in the galaxy, alright, I am space the apartment of stays.
Moiya McTier 42:48
So it's because of the infrared observations that we've done, that we were able to study the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, because there's a lot of like stars and gas and dust between us and the center of the galaxy. So we needed those infrared wavelengths to cut through all the dust. And some of the infrared images that we've captured of the center of the galaxy are breathtaking. They're so beautiful, but not as beautiful as the radio images. I'm just gonna say that now. spoiler, spoiler, yeah, so the the telescopes that observe in the infrared, there are a lot of them so many, because we really like to see through all this dust. But the Hubble Telescope will observe in the infrared sometimes, the Herschel telescope was specifically meant to observe in the infrared, and JW S T, whose name I will also not be saying out loud, the just wonderful space telescope will be able to observe in the infrared. Cool, now that's that on that. Next, microwave light
Corinne Caputo 43:50
microwaves. I know them. You've heard you've used one. I've used one. I don't have one. But I do wish I did. You don't have a microwave. I don't. It's like didn't kind of come with the apartment. And there's so little counterspace that we're like, what did even where would we even put it? But guess what, every day? Boy do? I wish I had a microwave. I could just heat something up real quick. Uh huh. Here I am putting things on the stove or in the oven like I'm in the 1800s
Moiya McTier 44:22
You know, I'm sure you're toiling just as much as I
Corinne Caputo 44:25
am toiling and no different than them.
Moiya McTier 44:29
And 1800s Before we knew about X rays and, and microwave before
Corinne Caputo 44:34
the Titanic.
Moiya McTier 44:37
microwave light can have wavelengths from one millimeter to 30 centimeters. So now we are finally starting to get into units or numbers. I know. Yeah, people know. wavelengths of light are usually very, very small. Yeah, I don't have much to say about what we observe in the microwave. I think the most interesting space Some knowledge that the microwave region of the spectrum has given us is knowledge of what we have named the cosmic microwave background. So in 1965, two scientists, one named Arno Penzias hence, Penzias and Robert Wilson,
Corinne Caputo 45:19
who's Zoomer name? Easy. Okay,
Moiya McTier 45:24
I got I love it. Arno Penzias, like, that's just a nice name.
Corinne Caputo 45:28
Very plain, Robert Wilson, Robert Wilson.
Moiya McTier 45:32
Together, they detected a buzz in the, in the microwave region of the spectrum that came from every single direction around their telescope. And most sources come from a very specific point in the sky, because they're coming from a target. But this was coming from everywhere. So they thought it was a mistake. They were like, are we picking up on some noise from electronics or from like, radio stations or something? They decided it wasn't that they thought, oh, maybe we're just picking up on some some weird radiation from all of the bird poop on the telescope.
Corinne Caputo 46:08
Oh, that's so funny. Poop is radiating. Yes.
Moiya McTier 46:13
Poop radiates. Let's remember that friends. Oh, my God. So they they cleaned up the telescope. And they caged, like all of the birds that they could find in the area to make sure they wouldn't put more poop on the telescope. But they kept seeing the signal. So then they were like, Okay, well, if it's not electronics, or bird poop, the only other thing that can be is like a real space thing.
Corinne Caputo 46:39
So funny. The options, oh my god, this is that's really funny. I didn't think of poop as being noisy. But I love
Moiya McTier 46:47
that. Maybe it's specifically pigeon poop. That's noisy. But yeah, I think all poop is noisy.
Corinne Caputo 46:52
I believe that.
Moiya McTier 46:55
So what they were observing was actually the basically heat signature left over from the Big Bang. Oh, and that's why it's everywhere, because the Big Bang technically happened everywhere. Because the Big Bang happened in that like, tiny little primordial atom almost 14 billion years ago. And then that whole thing expanded. And we are in, like, the expanded part of that. So the Big Bang happened everywhere it left its mark. And we see that as the cosmic microwave background.
Corinne Caputo 47:24
I'm so proud of us as humans for figuring it out. Yes, me too. Thank you. I'm, like, come so far, and to have like me to keep finding evidence, like proving that other idea. Oh, you guys, we did it. We're not done.
Moiya McTier 47:43
We still have so much more to learn. But I think that's really nice. That we have something to look forward to. And we should always have something to look forward to.
Corinne Caputo 47:50
Yes, you need one more thing. One more bite.
Moiya McTier 47:54
So I said that the cosmic microwave background is like the heat signature leftover from the Big Bang. And we just talked about how, if you're thinking about heat, you're probably thinking about infrared radiation, especially like, maybe not hot things, but warm things. Yeah. Right. And so it might be confusing that we call it the cosmic microwave background. But that's actually like a fun consequence of the expansion of the Universe. Because when the Big Bang happened, when the universe was much smaller, this signal was in the infrared. It was a heat signature. But as the universe expanded, those waves of light also expanded. Because microwaves are Yeah, like the literal wavelengths got bigger. So it went from being in the infrared to being in the microwave, which I think is really cool.
Corinne Caputo 48:46
I love that. I'm totally getting it less energetic, less. Okay,
Moiya McTier 48:51
I got it. You know, what, Corinne? Fuck humanity. I'm proud of you.
Corinne Caputo 48:57
Sleepy on the couch, understanding a new thing. I'm being very brave. You sure are.
Moiya McTier 49:06
So most of the telescopes that observing the microwave are actively looking at the cosmic microwave background, like the Cosmic Background Explorer or the COBie instrument or the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe or W map, or the plunk telescope blanc named after a person you know, like there's, there's also like clock time and plunk distance and the Planck institute so we can we can do a whole oh my god, I love that applause. But these instruments have been instrumental and showing us the like the shape and the distribution of the cosmic microwave background, which lets us understand how material was distributed in the early universe. So that's good. We we want to study the microwave And that leads us to the final region of the electromagnetic spectrum, the radio waves, the radio waves are anything above 30 centimeters in length, in wavelength, and, like from 30 centimeters all the way up to 1000s of meters. That's how big these wavelengths get. Wow,
Corinne Caputo 50:22
we're really just lumping them all in.
Moiya McTier 50:23
I know, right?
Corinne Caputo 50:26
We did that we get really specific sometimes. And then sometimes it's like everything else. I
Moiya McTier 50:31
love how the region, which shall not be named is is just like 300 nanometers wide. But then I've done you could have a radio wave that's 1000 meters away, that is 30 centimeters, like what the fuck, all right. And we can pretty much study anything in space using radio waves, they're really good at cutting through dust and gas, they're really good at letting us see into obscured regions of space. So we will study stars, black holes, galaxies, planets, you name it. And I love radio telescopes, there's, I think, I think radio telescopes might be my favorite telescope. And I'm not just saying that because my first research experience was with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Although I might be biased,
Corinne Caputo 51:16
although you might be a little biased.
Moiya McTier 51:20
But the cool thing about radio waves is that you don't need a mirror to collect them. Telescope, when you think of a telescope, you probably think of of something with a mirror dish so that it can collect the light, so that the light gets reflected off of the dish on to some instrument that collects the data. But radio waves are so large that you don't need a perfectly smooth flat surface to collect them. Okay, so you can walk on a radio telescope, and I have walked on a radio telescope, they look like giant satellite dishes. And I'll tell you about a few of my favorites because I cannot resist.
Corinne Caputo 51:59
Oh, okay, these radio telescopes. This is what I'm picturing when I not when I'm thinking of a telescope. But when I picture like, some sci fi movie where they're discovering alien life, and it's like they point the big thing at the sky.
Moiya McTier 52:12
Yeah, yeah. And the reason you think that is because of the movie contact? Yes, absolutely. So the movie contact was set at a real radio observatory, called the Very Large Array. And it's not just one telescope. It's actually I think, at this point, something like 27 telescopes working together in what is called an interferometer, which is where you have an array of telescopes working together. So that's the the VLA in New Mexico in the US. I have been there and it was great. I climbed onto one of the dishes, and I wasn't supposed to, but I also like climbed up the ladder, from the dish to the place where the actual data gets collected after it bounces off of the dish. I felt very cool that I have also been to another very famous radio telescope array called Alma, or the Atacama Large Millimeter slash submillimetre array, which I think gives you a look into into more astronomy acronyms, because that's a really terrible one.
Corinne Caputo 53:22
But I love the word Alma or the name. Yeah.
Moiya McTier 53:26
ALMA is one of the, like, highest state of the art radio observatories in the world. It's in a desert in Chile, and I went there, and it's like, the, this telescope is at the top of a mountain right next to a volcano. And it's the mountain is so high that you're above, like two thirds of the atmosphere, where the oxygen levels are really low. It's very cold. And I was so proud of myself that when we were up there, we were supposed to be driven around by these by a couple of trucks. I was with a group, we had to wear oxygen tanks. We had to get our like, heart rate and, and ox blood oxygen levels checked before we were allowed to go up to the summit. And we all pass the test and then we went up there and both of the trucks broke down. No, no, oh my god. So the trucks broke down. And and like the radios, the ironically, the radios weren't working. So
Corinne Caputo 54:27
I have to tell you, I know how this ends. Clearly you're alive.
Moiya McTier 54:33
I had to run to go get like an a telescope operator or something, someone who could message down to the main camp and come get us. So I did. I was so proud of myself, like running above two thirds of the atmosphere. And then I made a snow angel. I mean, the snow angel under the telescopes, but Yeah, almost fantastic. I think one of the most beautiful images I've Scene from ALMA has been of a stellar system actively forming new planets. Because you have like the, we've covered this in episode one, actually how planets formed, you have the baby star in the middle, and then this big disk of gas and stuff like gas and pebbles around it. And the planets form in that disk. And so Alma has actually taken images of planet forming regions where you can see the dark pads. Oh, that's so on the disk as the planets are formed. That's very cool. And then the telescope that will always always have a special place in my heart is the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. It was the first telescope I visited way back in high school. It is a single dish. So not like the other two that I just talked about. It is a single dish that is more than 300 meters in diameter. It's bigger than a football field.
Corinne Caputo 55:53
Oh my god, it looks huge. I'm looking at some pictures. It's frickin
Moiya McTier 55:56
huge. It was, I don't think it is anymore. But at one point, and definitely when I visited, it was the largest steerable single dish telescope in the world.
Corinne Caputo 56:07
Yeah, I'm seeing some of these pictures that I was gonna say it looks like it's always at a different angle. Or like, whoa, move it. It's crazy. That's something that big moves.
Moiya McTier 56:16
I know. I know. That's why it's really
Corinne Caputo 56:18
really good job, everybody.
Moiya McTier 56:22
There's so many cool things about radio telescope. Can you tell? Can you tell? I really like Yeah. I thought should I go from gamma to radio or radio to gamma? I was like, No, I want to go on and on something fun. So another cool thing about the GBT is that it sits in the United States is national radio quiet zone. This is an area that straddles the border between Virginia and West Virginia. And it's 1000s of square miles, where the type of radio emission that you can produce is limited. So not in the entire radio quiet zone. But in the centers around the GBT and the other telescopes at the observatory. There are very strict rules about what radio waves you can emit. And like pretty much everything we do emits radio waves. So when you're in the center of the radio quiet zone, you can't use Wi Fi. You can't use cell phones, you can't use microwaves,
Corinne Caputo 57:19
okay, well, I might be fine there.
Moiya McTier 57:23
You live in the radio quite a twist. If you do want to use some of those things, you have to do it in a Faraday cage, which is this contraption that will block electromagnetic radiation, okay. And that you also have to drive like special cars that don't have spark plugs because they'll give off radio waves. Oh my god, this is so that when you're taking an observation on one of these radio telescopes, you don't have to worry about accidentally catching a signal from just like Joe Schmo, right eating up a burrito in his microwave. My
Corinne Caputo 57:58
god. Yeah, of course. I understand logically why you need to do it, but it somehow feels like so restrictive.
Moiya McTier 58:06
Yeah. And so the people who work there, you know, they, they know going into it that they're going to have these restrictions. I mean, they have, they have internet, they just have to use Ethernet cords and they they have plenty of Faraday cages around like I've been, I've stayed in the dorms around the GBT and I have gone into the control room. And in all of these central spaces, they have Faraday cages where you can go in and like use a microwave.
Corinne Caputo 58:33
Oh, that's awesome. Yeah.
Moiya McTier 58:35
And that's it. That's, that's the electromagnetic spectrum.
Corinne Caputo 58:38
Yay. Beautiful. It's been a long journey,
Moiya McTier 58:44
but I love it. Yeah. Any reactions?
Corinne Caputo 58:46
Okay. I think what I knew and totally forgot was that remote controls and things fall on the spectrum. And like, of course they do, but I don't think about it logically because it's not like light that I see or witness or think about. So I'm grateful for remote controls, right?
Moiya McTier 59:06
Pretty much everything that we do today relies on like, yeah, you're listening to the radio. That's not sound waves that a light waves that get interpreted by the machine in your car, or like sending texts or like so many things rely on electromagnetic radiation.
Corinne Caputo 59:24
I personally really rely on it more than I realized. I just like don't think about how things happen. I'm just like texting someone. And I'm like the other day I was like, how does this work? Well, why would you
Moiya McTier 59:35
think about like, Yeah, I'm just happy about it these days. Yeah, yeah,
Corinne Caputo 59:39
I'm happy I'm here and it's doing its thing and now I get to order dinner right to my house.
Moiya McTier 59:45
The peak of civilization IMO. So I think we all know that the radio is my favorite region of the electromagnetic. That was clear. Corinne, did you have a favorite region?
Corinne Caputo 59:58
Okay, I'm really You torn because this is such a silly answer. And it's absolutely because I don't have access to it but microwaves because a sec, I used to make a lot, I worked in a movie theater in high school. And I would come home really late at night after the last show, I would put on Saturday Night Live. And I would make, I would cut open like raw peppers like jalapeno peppers and put in like truly a block of cream cheese inside of it. And I would microwave it. And it was this really big comfort snack for me. Huge, the caloric intake west of psycho hot blocks of cream, cheese and peppers. And I have a really special place in my heart for for proper mic, microwaves. And then I would take my contact lenses out and go to bed, and I would still have jalapeno oil on my fingers. And that is a mistake I made more than once was the thing I don't learn. And here I am again, this is why we're here because I certainly took science class and reteach.
Moiya McTier 1:01:08
You know, at least you don't have a microwave now. So you you can't I can't make that mistake again. You have been forced to learn not to do
Corinne Caputo 1:01:17
that. But I do miss microwaves. And I love what they do for me and my late night snacking.
Moiya McTier 1:01:23
microwaves do actually use microwaves to heat up food, the way that they work is by using a specific wavelength of microwave light that excites water molecules. It vibrates the water molecules and that heats them up. And that is how your food heats up. I love that. So there's like so you have fun things you can do. Yeah, that's why you should add water to some things when you're heating it up. But it's also like there are some fun things like if you have a perfectly like pure frozen ice cube, there's no liquid water in it. And so it will not heat up in a microwave, it will melt just because of like the ambient temperature. But it won't the microwave will not make it melt. Interesting.
Corinne Caputo 1:02:05
I had no idea about that. Good thing, I don't have a microwave to run a bunch of experiments right now. Like can I microwave this?
Moiya McTier 1:02:11
Another another fun. You just keep reminding me of cool things about microwaves both the the region of the spectrum and the tool. We used to do a lab when I was in grad school for like teaching a lab for undergrads where you measure the speed of light using a microwave like you take a chocolate bar or something and you put it in the microwave. And you can see where it melts the most there'll be like two points on the bar where it melts. So you can measure the wavelength of light.
Corinne Caputo 1:02:38
That's so like it's the oh my god, that's so fun.
Moiya McTier 1:02:41
And because I met I mentioned that formula where you can go from wavelength to frequency by using the speed of light. If you know the wavelength and you know the frequency, you can also measure the speed of light.
Corinne Caputo 1:02:52
I love that I love these hands on applications.
Moiya McTier 1:02:58
But there are a lot of listeners out there right now just like putting chocolate bars in there, Mike Yeah,
Corinne Caputo 1:03:02
everyone put us in the microwave and let me know what happens because I can't do it myself.
Moiya McTier 1:03:07
There's another fun experiment you can do with a marshmallow. But I don't really remember what that one was supposed to teach you other than if you put a marshmallow in a microwave it's gonna get huge
Corinne Caputo 1:03:16
this summer camp where I fed children tonic jello, we we made like molecules out of pretzels and marshmallows. And that was really fun.
Moiya McTier 1:03:24
That's that's all I have. I I know it felt like I was gonna go on forever.
Corinne Caputo 1:03:30
But that's all I have. Not at all. But now I'm getting hungry and sleepy. The perfect combo.
Moiya McTier 1:03:36
Well, I mean, I know we are at your parents house. Is there any way they have a nice dinner waiting for us?
Corinne Caputo 1:03:41
I don't know about nice, but it would be there
Moiya McTier 1:03:45
anything that we can eat on this couch is gonna be real nice. I'm
Corinne Caputo 1:03:48
almost positive there's frozen pizza. Okay, good.
Moiya McTier 1:03:54
All right, well, that's all we have. But until next week, what we really want you to remember is that you like Cohen's apartment, or space. Fine. Bye
Pale Blue Pod was created by Moiya McTier and Corrine Caputo with help from the Multitude Productions team. Our theme music is by Evan Johnston and our cover art is by Shea McMullin. Our audio editing is handled by the incomparable Mischa Stanton.
Corinne Caputo 1:04:28
Stay in touch with us and the universe by following @PaleBluePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or check out our website palebluepod[dot]com. We're a member of Multitude, an independent podcast collective and production studio. If you like Pale Blue Pod, you will love the other shows that live on our website at multitude[dot]productions.
Moiya McTier 1:04:51
If you want to support Pale Blue Pod financially, join our community over at patreon[dot]com/palebluepod. For just about $1 per episode, you get a shout out on one of our shows and access to directors commentary for each episode. The very best way, though, to help Pale Blue Pod grow is to share it with your friends. So send this episode, this link, to one person who you think will like it and we will appreciate you forever.
Corinne Caputo 1:05:13
Thanks for listening to Pale Blue Pod. You'll hear us again next week. Bye!