Is There A Ninth Planet? 🪐
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Season 2: Episode 4 Description
In today’s episode: 🌌 Go deep into space with Jacob and Olivia Rozencwaig from the Curious Kid Podcast. 🪐 Hear why Pluto was taken off the planet list and why scientists think there might be a different 9th planet in our solar system. 🔭 Have a telescope? Here are a few fun facts about these magnifying marvels. 🛰️ In the news round-up: ⚾ Breaking baseball barriers and protecting komodo dragons. 🦎 And test your Hubble Telescope knowledge in today's Trivia on the Ten. 🤔
⚾ Read more about the Bryan Ruby of the Salem-Keizer Volcanos https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2021/09/02/bryan-ruby-only-active-professional-baseball-player-out-gay/8244571002/
Sources for the episode:
https://www.science.org/news/2021/01/how-famed-arecibo-telescope-fell-and-how-it-might-rise-again
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope
https://www.nasa.gov/content/hubbles-mirror-flaw
Links
🦴 Learn more about the Hubble Telescope at Nasa's Hubblesite https://hubblesite.org/
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TRANSCRIPT:
Bethany Van Delft 0:01
Scientists are seeing deeper and deeper into space. Could they find another planet? Today, we'll hear the latest in Space News. I'm Bethany Van Delft. It's September 9th, and this is The Ten News.
Various Voices 0:16
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
Bethany Van Delft 0:24
My very educated mother just served us noodles. What? That's a mnemonic device or a way to remember the names of all the planets in our solar system. The sentence is based on the first letters of each planet, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. It used to be, my very educated mother just served us nine pizzas, back when Pluto was on the planet list. Why did Pluto get taken off the list? And, is there another ninth planet out there? Jacob and Olivia Rozencwaig from the Curious Kid Podcast is here to tell us more about what's up with the solar system.
Jacob Rozencwaig 1:10
When I was a kid, there were nine planets including the eight planets we know of today, plus the planet furthest from the sun named Pluto. But something strange happened 15 years ago.
Olivia Rozencwaig 1:22
That's when scientists decided to demote Pluto to a dwarf planet, leaving us with only eight planets. Okaaay.
Jacob Rozencwaig 1:31
In order to be considered a planet three things need to be true. First, it has to orbit the sun. It takes one year for Earth to orbit the sun. Planets that are closer to the sun, like Mercury, for example, are able to orbit the Sun faster. Mercury is able to make its trip around the sun in only 88 days.
Olivia Rozencwaig 1:52
For planets further from the sun, it takes a lot longer. In the case of Pluto, it takes 248 years to orbit the sun.
Jacob Rozencwaig 2:04
That's a long time. But, Pluto still qualifies because it does orbit the Sun. The second thing a planet would need to do is have enough mass to be almost perfectly round, like our beautiful planet Earth. Once again, Pluto qualifies because it is round. Nice.
Olivia Rozencwaig 2:21
The last thing a planet would have to do is be able to clear the neighborhood around its orbit.
Jacob Rozencwaig 2:28
That means that as planets move around they are able to push other objects out of their way using gravity. Unfortunately for Pluto, it doesn't clear its orbit very well and as a result, it's no longer considered a planet.
Olivia Rozencwaig 2:46
But, that doesn't necessarily mean that we don't have nine planets, or maybe even more.
Jacob Rozencwaig 2:52
Many scientists are convinced that a ninth planet exists even though it hasn't been discovered yet. Really?
Olivia Rozencwaig 2:58
They believe that it's so far away, then it would take the planet about 10,000 years to make a single trip around the sun.
Jacob Rozencwaig 3:06
And they also think that the ninth planet would be really big, about five times the mass of Earth.
Olivia Rozencwaig 3:12
No way! But, why would scientists be convinced that there's a ninth planet all the way out there even though they haven't found it yet?
Jacob Rozencwaig 3:22
That's a great question. One of the things that scientists point to when they suggest that a ninth planet must exist is that there are lots of objects far, far away that have odd clustered orbits, which suggests that there must be something like a planet that is influencing those objects to move the way they do.
Olivia Rozencwaig 3:42
That's exactly how Neptune was discovered in the year 1846.
Jacob Rozencwaig 3:46
Neptune was discovered by observing the planet Uranus, which before 1846 was the furthest planet from the sun. When observing the path of Uranus around the sun, scientists saw strange irregularities in its path around the sun, which could only be explained if there was another planet acting on it. You're kidding me! With some help from mathematicians who helped pinpoint where the mystery planet would likely be, Neptune was finally discovered.
Olivia Rozencwaig 4:15
Even though there is some debate on the existence of a ninth planet. Many scientists think that we are really close to discovering the first true planet to be discovered since Neptune was discovered 175 years ago.
Jacob Rozencwaig 4:31
And, if a ninth planet gets discovered soon that news would truly be out of this world.
Bethany Van Delft 4:38
Why, thank you, Jacob and Olivia. Whether we're looking for the ninth planet, looking at faraway galaxies, or even searching for aliens, a telescope is a handy tool to see deep into the night sky. Telescopes come in all shapes and sizes, from the kind you might look through at home or school, to observatories, buildings that hold giant telescopes up to 30 feet high. Wow! Here are three fun facts about telescopes. Number one, being big is not easy. One of the biggest telescopes on Earth was at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, with a 1,000-foot wide radio reflector dish Arecibo was as big as three football fields. But I say it was because, in December of 2020, the telescope suffered a catastrophic collapse. This is terrible. It is not the end for Aricebo though, it may take 10 years or more, but talks are already in progress with both the US government and private foundations to build a new telescope in Puerto Rico. Number two, not all telescopes are on Earth. That's right. To get a better view of the stars from outside Earth's atmosphere, some telescopes are mounted onto satellites and then launched into space. One of the most famous and my personal favorites is the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been sending back pictures of the universe since it was launched in 1990. Awesome! Number three, some satellites need glasses? Initially, the first pictures that Hubble sent back were blurry due to a tiny defect in a mirror. So how do you fix a telescope that's already in space? Astronauts from NASA flew to the telescope in a space shuttle and serviced it with a spacewalk. They added on a corrective lens to fix the problem. Hubble’s been sending back flawless pictures ever since so yeah, they put glasses on a satellite. Want to get in on the telescope action? You can look up astronomy nights in your community. Many cities and towns have clubs where people bring telescopes and let anyone take a look through them. Just watch out for aliens! Let's see what else is happening.
Bethany Van Delft 7:17
In sports news, Bryan Ruby of the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes became the only active professional baseball player to come out publicly as gay. Ruby said in an interview with USA Today Sports that he decided to come out because he wants to help create a world where future generations of baseball players don't have to sacrifice authenticity, or who they really are to play the game they love. In addition to playing baseball, Ruby is also a country music songwriter, courageous, sporty, and musical, Talk about a triple threat. How students in Waukesha Wisconsin will get free lunch at school regardless of how much money their families make. This was a change after the local school board had voted to no longer participate in a free federal program that provided food to families K-12 during the pandemic. Major public outrage led to the board reversing their position and opting back into the program, with the school board president saying that he was now better informed about the numbers of families facing food insecurity, meaning people without reliable access to food within his district. It Makes sense to me! And, back to science news. Last weekend, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature announced that the Komodo dragon is now considered in danger of becoming extinct. The
Komodo dragon is the world's largest lizard and is found in just a few islands in Indonesia. Climate change is causing its habitat to shrink. Unfortunately, this isn't the only animal we should be worried about. The IUCN announced that 37% of all sharks and ray species are also endangered. Okay, that's bad. And, now...
Various Voices 9:10
What, what, what's the big idea?
Bethany Van Delft 9:13
Trivia on The Ten. We talked about astronauts performing a spacewalk to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. But, that mission wasn't the only time Hubble has been repaired in space to keep it going for more than 30 years. How many times have astronauts visited the satellite? Is it a) twice, b) five times, or c) 12 times?
Bethany Van Delft 9:46
Did you guess it? The answer is five! There have been five servicing missions to the Hubble Space Telescope to replace everything from gyroscopes, the device that keeps it pointed in the right direction to main computers. And, the Hubble has not been easy to maintain. Starting in June of 2021, the telescope was offline for over a month after a power unit failed. NASA was able to get it working again by switching to a backup unit that was installed during the last servicing mission in 2009.
Bethany Van Delft 10:30
Time is up, but before we go, here's a quick note for the grownups. Thanks for listening to The Ten News. Look out for new episodes on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and extras on Saturdays. You can go deeper into today's stories by visiting thetennews.com. The Ten News is a co-production of Small But Mighty Media and Next Chapter Podcasts and is distributed by iHeartRadio. The Ten News creative team is stargazing and includes Tracey Crooks, Pete Musto, Andrew Hall, and Nathalie Alonso. This episode was guest-written by Jonathan Kaplan, with contributions from Jacob and Olivia Rozencwaig. Our production director is Jeremiah Tittle and our executive producers are Donald Albright and show creator Tracy Leeds Kaplan. I'm Bethany Van Delft, and thanks for listening to The Ten News. All of this juicy news has left me hungry, oh very educated mother, can I have a snack?
