Latest / Made of Stars / Diverse Set of Organic Molecules Found on Mars

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Diverse Set of Organic Molecules Found on Mars · Made of Stars

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Warning. The following podcast contains an entertaining look at astronomy, physics, and
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space news throughout the known universe. Listeners have been known to learn about astronomical
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phenomenon the scientific method and expand their vocabulary to include terms like quasar asterism and
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uranus. Listen, that's your own risk. Go ahead. Where made of
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Stars? Made of stars? Made stars? You could be from Highllywood,
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New Mexico, Mars. Where are stars? When we are made of stars?
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Joined by my good friend doctor Sean Cruising from Columbua State University's Coca Cola
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Space Science. I'm Wes Carol, Hey, Sean West. It's good to
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be here with you. All right. I want to get to probably what
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would normally be our lead story for this week about you know, Congress and
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UFOs, but because last week we were talking about, you know, the
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accomplishments of the James Webb Space Telescope, and we went we highlighted some of
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the best images that they've they've had produced because of James Webb, the comeback
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story. America loves a comeback story. And then right in the midst of
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all that, we get a brand new, incredible image from the James web
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Space Telescope. So I figured that'd be a good place to start. Following
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from last week's topics. Yeah, so James Webb went up Christmas of the
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previous year, and so it's it didn't get going on its science images for
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a few months. They had to obviously deploy all the instruments and they had
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to do all their calibrations and things like that. So right now it's just
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been twelve months basically since they've been doing science images. So they're having a
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celebration of the first year of science and so in honor of the first year
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of science coming from the James web Space Telescope, they released an absolutely unbelievable
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image. It's a it's a region of star formation. It's called row o
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fiu Guy. And that's that's kind of a tough one to you know,
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go from hearing with your ears to spelling. So it's Rho and then O
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p i u Hi. It's in the constellation of Ophiucus, the snake handler
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if people know that when it's a summertime constellation anyway, So Rowfu Guy is
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a certain star. Now, it turns out when you point your telescope up
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at this star, you can kind of see some haziness around it, and
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that's because this certain star is actually a star formation region in the sky.
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So it's a place where brand new baby stars are being born, born out
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of a giant cloud of hydrogen. So okay, that's great. But now
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take the James Webb's face telescope and point it at that object, and oh
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my gosh, I've had so many people tell me that image looks fake.
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It looks CG computer generated. Right, It's true, by the way it
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does, you know, that is kind of what it invokes. But what
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I tell people is, well, how did the computer artists know what to
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make their CG images look like? And the only reason they know how to
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make their images look like what they look like is because astronomers take pictures and
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things in the sky. Right, So this is a picture that looks like
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what CG should be trying to represent. It just happens to be in so
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much detail that it fools you that it's not really an astronomical image, but
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it's something generated by artificially by a computer. But no, ladies and gentlemen,
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it's not. It is a real picture of an object in the nighttime
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sky that is so incredible, detailed, colorful, and beautiful that your mind
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makes you want to think it's fake. That's what this picture looks like.
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Ladies and gentlemen. Check it out. You can go to space dot com
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right now and see James Webspace Telescope image celebrating one year of science the Rowfu
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Guys Stellar Nursery. Absolutely incredible. It was released on July twelfth, which
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for US recording here that was yesterday, so it's released just a day ago,
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and it's a it's a fantastic image of what the science tells us is
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the star formation region. But if you don't care anything about science or even
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about space, if you just want to see a beautiful image, check out
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the row ou Guy Stellar Nursery from the James Webspace Telescope. I'll put this
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picture on our Facebook page as well, like we did with the show with
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the images from the show last week, so you can check it out there
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as well. And I'm just gonna you know, you described it well by
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just saying that it's an image that looks so incredible that it makes you think
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that you're seeing something that's not real. Here's what I see and for the
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second time, and I'm not you know, I'm not too obsessed with the
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Marvel universe. But again, I'm seeing Thanos, and I'm seeing the top
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of Thanos's head wearing his gold helmet, and I see his hand up with
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the gauntlet and he's snapping right in front of him. So you're seeing the
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view of Thanos snapping the Infinity Gauntlet. And it's even got a little star
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in there that looks like where the snap is happening, and maybe all the
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magic is happening and people are disappearing. But that's what I see, and
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I know it's like looking at clouds kind of it's in the eye of the
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beholder, but that's kind of what I see when I look at it.
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And it's yet again another Thanos inspired image from the James web Space telescope.
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For me, yes, these interpretations very from person to person. Obviously,
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this is sort of an ink blot test, right, Yeah, no,
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it is. It is a bit like that rare shocky right anyway. So
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but to me, it looks like, you know, ahead of golden hair
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of some maiden that's just glowing in the darkness, and then she has a
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small red alligator attached to one side. I can see that. I can
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definitely see that. Yes, I think maybe we need to have as about
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my personality, but that's that's me, that's what I see. We should
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have a contest. We should ask folks to go to the Facebook page,
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look at the image and tell us what they see. Do you see the
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alligator? Do you see thanos? Do you see something else? Because there's
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all sorts of things you might see in there. I kind of now,
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I see a little bit of a mushroom cloud. Is there a nuclear blast
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happening from that alligator's head? I don't know. I don't know what's going
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on. I can see that too. I see what you're seeing there.
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There, there's a lot there. It's an incredible image. It's definitely worth
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checking out for sure, and more incredible accomplishments for the James Web Space Telescope
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in just a short amount of time in service. All right, now,
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let's talk about UFOs or UAPs or whatever they're called now, because we've we've
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already addressed this a couple of times. I mean in the you know,
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dozen years or so thirteen whatever we're up to now that we've been covering space
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news, there's been a number of UFO related stories over the years, but
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none of them has seemed anywhere close to as credible as ones that we're starting
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to get. And we use credible still in quotes because we still haven't we
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haven't seen you know, actual little green men. I mean, some people
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say they have. We haven't seen that yet. We don't know what's going
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on. But as we start to get a number of credible sources involved,
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and that suddenly makes things seem just a little more were credible. And just
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a few weeks ago we were talking about this very thing. Well, now
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here we go again, more reasons to go what so yeah, and that's
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kind of where I'm at. Actually, I'm in that giant question mark at
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the end of some sentence. That's right. So so look, I mean,
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we have a show here where we have fun and we goof around and
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we have a good time. But we we do that in the context of
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space news. And when I'm talking about space news, I'm really coming from
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a perspective of science, and so science requires evidence, and there is no
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evidence in my hand that I can really address these things. So I'm going
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to keep this brief. But here's the thing. There there are video segments
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that are being shown and analyzed, shown too and analyzed by members of Congress,
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and there's other commissions and other panels that are looking into these videos.
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And you use the right term, which is UAP. It's kind of an
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all encompassing term because it's it's it's definition is unidentified anomalous phenomenon. Now,
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it was at one point unidentified aerial phenomenon until some of these videos started showing
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these unknown objects fly right under the water and traverse ocean. So then they
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said, well, it's not an aerial phenomenon strictly anymore. It's now just
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an anomalous phenomenon. So it's unidentified anomalous phenomenon or UAP is the term that's
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kind of superseded now UFOs from the old days. There's a House Oversight Committee
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that has been looking into this with the US military, and they've been own
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some classified footage. Apparently, once again, I've not necessarily seen what they've
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seen. I have seen a few of these Navy videos out there on TV,
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but I've not actually seen these unreleased to the public videos they're being referred
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to. There's a gentleman by the name of Tim Burschette. Tim is a
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representative from the Great State of Tennessee. He's on the House Oversight Committee.
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And he came out with this quote after seeing some of this as yet unreleased
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classified footage. Quote, if they're out there, they're out there, and
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if they have this kind of technology, they could have turned us into charcoal.
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Briquette. That's reassuring. So I don't know what in the h this
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man saw on video that would inspire him, not in an official statement,
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but rather in a podcast called The Event Reison. And by the way,
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this is all being referred to a story on Foxnews dot com, But this
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story is not only from Foxnews dot Com. It's from multiple places. Apparently
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Apparently Representative Burchette was on the podcast Event Horizon. And since we're doing a
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podcast, I like to credit other podcasts when they should be credited, and
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on the Event Horizon podcast he came out with that quote, they could turn
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us into charco Brookette. Now there's more to that quote. I would encourage
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you to go read one of these news stories. I kind of wish he
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would have waited for the official statement from the United States government on a reaction
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to this, rather than going out on a podcast and making shall we call
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it an inflammatory statement since it's leading to Charco Brooketts, it's probably inflammatory in
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some literal sense. I mean, I would think maybe he's seen a laser,
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right, I mean, I don't know. I don't know what else
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would turn us into charcoalbricts other than some really hot source. So I'm thinking
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laser. I mean, I would be willing to bet there are many weapons
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in the arsenal of the United States Military that could effectively turn you into what
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might be referred to as a charcobracat. But you know that's again, this
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is an uninformed, unprofessional opinion of mine, not being a member of the
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United States military. Anyway, this does come on the heels west of what
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we have talked about on an earlier episode. A decorated Air Force veteran and
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somewhat expert in the field of Air Force intelligence by the name of David Grouse,
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who came out a couple of weeks ago, a few weeks ago and
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claim that the government has been running a secret UFO retrieval program and they actually
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have alien technology in hand. So we thought that was rather unusual, But
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then now Senator Marco Rubio is weighed in and said that these claims by mister
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Grouse have been confirmed by other high level government whistleblowers with high clearances. They've
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come out and kind of confirmed that. And Senator Marco Rubio, who we
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know to be a reasonably reliable human being once ran for president of the United
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States, told an outlet called News Nation that that was true at the end
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of June. So yeah, this is all taking on a new, weird,
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sort of affirmed by members of Congress kind of perspective. And again,
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I'm a scientist, but I also have a space podcast. The scientist in
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me says, I haven't seen one damn piece of evidence, and evidence would
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be important, yes, But the host of the space podcast as well,
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I have a space podcast where we talked about space news. This seems to
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have something to do with space and it's definitely in the news. So ladies
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and gentlemen, I'm going to leave it there and not take it any further
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and just point you to say, you know, maybe go read some of
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these stories. They're at least interesting. How about that? Well? As
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a longtime broadcaster, humorist, and host of a space news podcast, I'll
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just I'll just say we're all gonna die in the form of charcoal briquettes.
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Clearly, I mean the evidence is there apparently, No, I don't know.
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Well, well, we have to just wait and see. That's the
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way science works. We wait and see. So we wait and see and
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ultimately that's it. But you're right, this is news and people are talking
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about it, including Marco Rubio exactly. And and to your point, West,
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it is news, it is not science. Yeah, there you go.
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That's well, still waiting for the science. And so the scientist in
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me just has to, you know, reaffirm that to our our our listenership
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here on Made of Stars that I have yet to see science on this friends,
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I have just seen news. But the news is getting to be a
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bit, you know, well eye opening, perhaps, I don't know.
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So we talk a lot about rockets, we talk a lot about obviously commercial
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space, we talk about NASA occasionally, we talk about other countries. We
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haven't talked a whole lot about the Arion five. But this is the retirement
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of the Rion five is going to create some complications for Europe. Yeah,
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so there is a there's an occasional space payload that we may have mentioned somewhere
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along the way that is some kind of a collaboration between NASA and ISSA,
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which is the European Space Agency, and because of whatever agreements they go into,
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they take those payloads down to French Guiana and lob them up from you
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know, the northern tip of South America, basically into space from the European
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Space Agency launch site in French Guiana. A lot of times when that happens,
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they're riding the European heavy Lift rocket, which is the Arion five.
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So there's all there are a lot of major space payloads, again mostly from
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the European Space Agency, that have hitched a ride to low Earth orbit orbiot
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from the area on five and so the last of those payloads launched on July
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fifth from the Guiana Space Center and and then they promptly retired that launch platform.
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So the interesting thing here is that the European Space Agency has effectively lost
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their heavy lift rocket platform to put big payloads up into space. Now,
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it's not that they don't have a backup plan, it's just that sometimes those
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backup plans don't overlap with the current generation spacecraft. The United States actually had
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this exact same problem when the Space Shuttle program retired. Now, we did
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have a couple other heavy lift platforms, but we didn't have a platform that
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could quite do the same things that Space Shuttle could do, most specifically put
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human beings into low Earth orbit, So we had to hitch a ride for
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five years with the Russians. Right. So, now the European Space Agency
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finds itself in a similar not exactly the same, but a similar situation where
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they don't have this heavy lift platform that they had for twenty seven years for
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a one hundred and seventeen flights. The Arion five a very reliable, very
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workhorse payload system. So now Europe is facing months, if not longer,
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before they're going to be able to have access to space to put their own
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large payloads up without hitch a ride with the Americans or the Russians or somebody
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else. Okay, So they have a successor rocket in place. It's called
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the Arion six. The Rion six is actually being constructed, it's just not
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quite ready to go yet. They anticipate that probably by November they're going to
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be shipping the stages of this rocket down to French Guiana, you know,
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from France and Germany down there to be able to assemble and do wet tests
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and all the kinds of things that we've had to see SpaceX do on both
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their Falcon Heavy and their Starship rocket, all the kind of fuel up tests
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and everything before they ever do their first launch, and then sometime after that
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they'll launch this rocket. Now they're still hoping to get it launched by twenty
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twenty four. Many industry experts are saying, yeah, it's it's gonna be
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later in twenty twenty four. Probably won't be you know, this year or
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early in twenty twenty four, probably be later sometime like a year from now
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or or thereabouts. So anyway, interesting thing. It's a you know,
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we tip our hats to the French people who designed Thereon five and that great
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launch platform for European Space Agency, but it is now out of service and
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they're looking for a new ride coming up after a quick break. Perseverance has
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found something very interesting on Mars. I guess I probably should have said they've
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found something else interesting on Mars, because it's found other interesting things. This
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isn't the beginning, certainly not, but this one's pretty significant, or at
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least it has potential to be. Obviously, we have some science to do
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involving this. We don't have to do it, thankfully, somebody else is
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going to take care of the science part of it. We just get to
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talk about it. But this is pretty the building blocks of life potentially found
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on Mars, some sort of organics, but there could be a couple of
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possible reasons it's there. Yeah, I thought you were going to tell me
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they found Marco Rubio on Mars. At this point, I'm just waiting on
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Marco Rubio is on Mars, and he's gonna tell us he's seen it,
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He's been there, he knows, he knows what's going on. So well,
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So Marco hasn't been seen up there yet, you know, Polo,
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you know, I don't know. He hasn't been seen up there yet anyway,
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So, and no monkeys yet, there's been no monkeys found on Mars.
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I used to know a guy zero who believed the information of any monkeys
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running around. This guy believed there were monkeys and if there were, if
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we had sent monkeys to Mars, that would have that would have been a
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news story as well. Okay, that would have been a pretty big news
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story. First of all, how are they eating, what are they how
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are they functioning up there? How are they How many bananas are inside the
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monkey Mars suits? I don't know how that would work, but it would
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have been news and it would have been worthy of Senator Marco Rubio to talk
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about. But that hasn't happened. But we have something that's been discovered on
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Mars that's not monkeys, and it's a pretty big discovery. None of those
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things that West mentioned have been have been found yet, none, not yet.
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I like that, you said, yeah, yeah, I mean I
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like to reserve judgment. It's true you are a scientist, so yes,
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you know, there's always that other hand on the other hand, right,
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Okay, anyway, so yes, what has been found on Mars. Well,
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ladies and gentlemen, we found organic molecules on Mars. And you might
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say, well, that's not news. They've already been found. Yes they
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have. Some organic molecules have been found. But the latest story coming out
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of the California Institute of Technology and published in the journal Nature on July twelve,
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is that some astrobiologists have found a concentration of a diverse set of organic
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molecules that's really the news, right, The news is not, hey,
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we found one kind of compound. No, no, no, They have
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found some sort of variety of organic compounds. And they know this because they
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have actual physical evidence coming from the spectrographs aboard the Perseverance Rover up there on
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the surface of Mars. See, the Perseverance Rover has the ability to illuminate
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geological samples with the kind of UV light that would make organic compounds resonate and
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produce their own fingerprints of light. And this phenomenon has been seen now by
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the instruments aboard Perseverance, and the group from the California Institute of Technology has
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analyzed that and they are saying, quote, there are an exciting clue for
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astrobiologists, since they are often thought of as the building blocks of life.
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That quote is from the study lead author Sunanda Sharma of the Planetary Science Institute
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at California Institute of Technology. Okay, so all of that is onspace dot
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com and a great article. You can go check out the article there.
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But here's the important part. To continue the quote from the scientists. It
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says to confirm the presence of organics and their specific types, we would need
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the samples to be returned to the Earth. That's our goal, you see,
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ladies and gentlemen. The problem is there are also geological processes that can
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produce these organic compounds. So yes, they found a high concentration of organic
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material. And yes it's in a place where they went there to look for
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life anyway, which is in the Jesero Crater. That's where the Perseverance rovers
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driving around. And yes, it's in the clays of Mars, which leave
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clear evidence of the past existence of water in that very same environment. And
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yes, these the kinds of organic compounds that you would ex to find in
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an aqueous environment or in other words, a water environment. So all of
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those things are true. But to see the way scientists talk is they say,
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but on the other hand, there's still a pretty good possibility, or
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at least a non zero possibility, that geological processes could have formed these same
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organic compounds. So they exercise caution in their statements and let the science happen.
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Another story, We got an exoplanet that has a pretty cool phenomenon there,
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titanium clouds on this that gives it a mirror like appearance. Yeah,
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this is a really weird story. Right, So imagine, I'd imagine an
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atmosphere of titanium. What how could that even be? How can you make
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titanium air well? So you don't necessarily do that. It's not like a
24:47
solid titanium layer. We're not seeing a metal planet out there. But what
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we're seeing is apparently an exoplanet that has a very high concentration of silicate dust,
25:00
think like sandy dust storm kind of atmosphere. That that silicate has combined
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with titanium to make titanium laced silicates in that atmosphere. And so the silicate
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material that's floating around like dust in the atmosphere of this exoplanet has enough titanium
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in it that it makes the atmosphere very shiny. And this exoplanet is called
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LTT nine seven seven nine B. That's just a catalog number. It reflects
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about eighty percent of the light falling on it from its nearby star, so,
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in other words, only twenty percent of that starlight gets through the atmosphere
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of this exoplanet that's about the size of Neptune. And it's close enough to
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its parent star that it orbits every nineteen hours, So, in other words,
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if it didn't have all this titanium in its atmosphere, that starlight would
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probably be so bright and cause so much heat that it would simply evaporate this
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Neptune sized planet. But the reason this planet can exist in that very close
26:11
proximity to its parent star is because it has this sort of titanium silicate shield
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built into its atmosphere. And so these very bright cloud layers of titanium sand
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act like a mirror and reflect all that light while not all of it,
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eighty percent of that light back out, and they keep the environment of the
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interior of that planet cool enough that it doesn't just simply melt like butter on
26:38
a hot sidewalk and disintegrate into nothing. It's still able to survive in place
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in that hot environment. They've run tests or they've done simulations, and they
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said that on the Sun side of this planet, without that titanium layer,
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the temperatures in the atmosphere would be over two thousand degrees celsius. That's pushing
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on up to as hot as the atmosphere of a star. So that's far
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too hot for any kind of a gas giant type planet like Neptune to exist.
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And so again once Again, if it wasn't for these bright clouds,
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that planet probably wouldn't be there at all. So this is what it's called
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an ultra hot neptune. It's surviving because apparently it has titanium silicit in its
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atmosphere. How do we know that because the astronomers had pulled that titanium silicate
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signature out of the reflected spectrum from that planet. So great story on Universe
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today dot com, all about the titanium clouds on this exoplanet. Let's talk
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about what you guys have going on this the rest of the summer. I
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know we're getting closer and closer to getting back into the school year, and
27:51
I know that you have a summer camp going on this week. One of
27:53
my kids happens to be at that summer camp as we speak, playing with
27:59
robots and other thing not playing. He's learning about robots, but they're also
28:02
playing with him. I know there was a robot battle or something that took
28:03
place ur in the week. He was quite proud to win one of those
28:07
rounds, and I'm quite proud of him for it. Yeah, there's nothing
28:11
wrong with playing by learning, and yes he was able to win that round.
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I saw your son having a pretty darn good time yesterday with his teammates
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there, so yeah, pretty fun stuff. That's a high school camp.
28:22
We'd run camps for all ages. This is a kind of the upper end
28:26
of our camps, and he's learning some pretty sophisticated robotics in there, so
28:30
hopefully they're having a great time this week. That's one of our summer activities
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we have going on, ladies and gentlemen, believe it or not. As
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West just said, even though it feels like we just finished up the fourth
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of July, we're already looking toward the end of summer. We're already looking
28:42
toward the back to school and we have one more astronomy night out there at
28:47
Callaway Gardens. It's on the seventeenth of July. It's a Monday night at
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Callaway Gardens, which is a nature area near to our city here in Columbus,
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Georgia, and our astronomy team will be taking their teleis up to that
29:00
location setting up the telescopes, and it's after the gardens closes down, so
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you can get in for free. It's a joint program with the Callaway Gardens
29:08
Education program up there, and we're happy to show people the nighttime sky with
29:11
our telescopes. But yeah, just one more Monday to go on that one.
29:15
It's the seventeenth of July, so make sure and schedule that Monday night
29:19
and come on out and join us before school gets going again. You can
29:22
have a great look through the telescopes out there at Callaway. As I sit
29:26
here and I'm being showered with cool air that was being repaired by my friend
29:33
Mike Norris and Tripp was with him, and they were from Norris Heating and
29:37
Air taking care of my heating and air unit. I've been baking in my
29:41
house for over a day now, so while we were doing this, he
29:47
was getting that taken care of, and I'm enjoying cool air. It's almost
29:51
like I've got I don't know, titanium protecting me from the heat. I
29:55
don't know, I don't know what that. But anyway, I do want
29:57
to thank him for that as a unofficial sponsor of today's show, because God
30:03
bless him for that minute. Feel it's already feeling better. I guess I
30:04
can put my shirt back on so and I know you'll appreciate that. Since
30:08
we do this by video, Thanks for listening. We will see you again
30:12
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