YouSaid · the spoken record

Konstantin Batygin

lines on the record: 160
first: 2021-07-19
most recent: 2021-07-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So, look, I know what you mean not to go on a huge video game, but the third witcher game? Was astonishingly beautiful, right? Especially like laying on a good hardware machine. It's like, this is pretty legit. That said, I don't resonate with the I want to stay here. One of the things that I love to do is to go to boxing gym and box with a guy. There's nothing quite like that physical, you know, experience.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of the video games, like on the PS4. Look pretty real to me, right? I think you would really have to interrogate. I mean, I think even with what we have today, like, I don't know, Ace Combat 7 is a great example. The way that the clouds are rendered, it's I mean, it looks just like when you're flying on a real airplane, the kind of transparency, I think that our perception is limited enough already to not be able to tell some of the differences.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a really interesting question. And because the solar system itself, and really the double pendulum is chaotic, right? Pendulum sitting on another pendulum moves unpredictably once you let them go. You really don't need to inject any randomness into a simulation for it to give you stochastic and unpredictable answers. Weather is a great example of this. Weather has a Lap enough time of typical weather systems have a lap enough time of a few days. I mean, there's a fundamental reason why the forecast always sucks, you know, two weeks in advance. It's not that we don't know the equations that govern. Atmosphere, we know them well. Their solutions are meaningless, though, after a few days.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm speculating about. One of the, yeah, I know you have a deep understanding of this, but for me, I'm just going to speculate that for at least in the types of simulations that we can do today. Inevitably, you run into the problem of resolution, right? It doesn't matter what you're doing, it is discrete. Now, the way you would go about asking if what we're observing is that a simulation or is that some real continuous thing is you zoom in and try and find the grid scale, if you will. Yeah, I mean”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because theoretical understanding, which is what ultimately I'm interested in, comes from taking complex things and reducing them down to something, some mechanism that you can actually quantify. That's the fun part of astrophysics, just kind of simulating things in extreme detail is we'll make cool visualizations, but that doesn't get to any better understanding than you had before you did the simulation.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am not a proponent of doing huge simulations because even if we forget the information theory aspect of not being able. Simulate in full detail the universe because if you do, then you have made an actual universe. It's not the simulation. But simulation is in some sense a compression. Of information, so therefore you must lose detail. But that point aside, if we are able to simulate the entire history of the solar system in excruciating detail, I mean, it'll be cool, but it's not going to be any different from observing it”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually think it's important, but at every stage, you have to design your experiments, your numerical computer experiments, so that they test some specific aspect of that evolution.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, that's simulatable. And people do these types of calculations. It's really cool. That's one of the many fields of planet formation theory that is really, really active right now. People are trying to understand all kinds of aspects of that process. Because, of course, I've explained it as if there's one thing that happens turns out. It's a beautifully rich dynamic. But qualitatively formation of the first building blocks actually follows the same sequence as formation of stars stars are just clouds of gas, hydrogen, helium, gas that sit in space and slowly cool. And at some point they... Contract to a point where their gravity overtakes the thermal pressure support, if you will, and they collapse under their own weight, you get a little baby solar system.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trend view, trying to write together, they are writing together to minimize the collective. Air resistance, if you will, that they experience. Turns out solids in the protoplanetary disk do just this. There's an instability wherein solid particles, right, things that are a centimeter across will start to hide behind one another and form these clouds. Why? Because cumulatively, that minimizes the solid component of the disk aerodynamic interaction with the gas. Now these clouds, because they're kind of a favorable, energetic condition for the dust to live in, they grow, grow, grow, grow, grow until they become so massive that they collapse under their own weight. That's how the first building blocks of planets form. That's how the big asteroids got there.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And are all rolling together and almost looks like a family of ducks crossing a street or something? Or, for example, if you watch Tour de France, you've got a whole bunch of cyclists and they're like cycling within 10 centimeters of each other.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah The chaos of whether the fact that it'll be blazing hot one minute, and then it's just like we'll decide to have a little thunderstorm, maybe we'll decide to go back momentarily to like a thousand degrees and then go back to the thunderstorm. It's amazing. That, by the way, is chaos theory in action. Right, but let's get back to talking about the desert. So in the desert, tumbleweeds have a tendency to roll because the wind rolls them. And if you're careful, you occasionally see this family of templeweeds where like there's like a big one and then a bunch of little ones that kind of hide in its wake.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, by the way, to continue on this tangent, I absolutely love the Southwest for this reason. During the pandemic, I drove from LA to New Mexico a bunch of times”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. So the disk that made From which the planets emerged was predominantly hydrogen, helium gas. On the other hand, the rings of Saturn are made up of icle, ice little like. Ice cubes this big, about a centimeter across.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so astrophysical disks span. Huge, huge amount of ranges. They start maybe at the smallest scale. They start with actually Kuiper belt objects. Some Kuiper belt objects have rings. So that's maybe the smallest example of an astrophysical disk. We've got this little potato-shaped asteroid. Which is sort of the size of LA or something, and around it are some rings of icy matter, that object is a small astrophysical disk. Then you have Saturn. Rings of Saturn. You have the next set of scales. You have the solar system itself when it was forming. You have this. Then you have black hole disks. You have galaxies. Disks are super common in the universe. The reason is that stuff rotates. Right. I mean, that's...”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also, it actually provides a pretty neat calculational tool because it's difficult. So we just talked about simulations, but it's difficult to simulate the behavior of astrophysical disks on time scales that are in between a few orbits and their entire evolution. So over a timescale of a few orbits, you do a hydrodynamic simulation that basically that's something that you can do on a modern computer, on a timescale of say a week. When it comes to their evolution over their entire lifetime, you don't hope to resolve the orbits. You just kind of hope to understand how the system behaves in between, right? To get access to that, as it turns out, it's pretty cute. You can use the Schr ⁇ dinger equation to get the answer rapidly.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, this is not the same thing as fusing relativity and quantum mechanics. But it did get me thinking a little bit. So the fact that waves in astrophysical disks behave just like wave functions of particles, kind of like an interesting analogy because for me, it's easier to imagine waves traveling through astrophysical disks or really just sheets of paper. The reason this is that analogy exists is because there's actually nothing quantum about the Schr ⁇ dinger equation. The Schr ⁇ dinger equation is just a wave equation and all of the interpretation that comes from it is quantum, but the equation itself is not a quantum being.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, there's a very broad theory that's already developed, but I was looking for some simpler way to explain it really for the purposes of teaching class. And so I thought, okay, what if I just imagine a disk as an infinite number of concentric circles that interact with each other gravitationally? That's a problem in some sense that I can solve using methods from the late 1700s. I can write down Hamiltonian. Well, I can write down the energy function basically of their interactions. And what I found is that when you take the continuum limit, when you go from discrete circles that are talking to each other gravitationally to a continuum disk, suddenly this gravitational interaction among them, the governing equation becomes the Schr ⁇ dinger equation. I had to think about that for a little bit.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, let me take a step back and just say it like I remember being utterly confused by quantum mechanics when I first learned it. And the Schr ⁇ dinger equation, which is kind of the parent equation of that whole field, seems to come out of nowhere, right? The way that I was sort of explaining, I remember asking my professor, but where does it come from? Is it like, well, just like don't worry about it and just calculate the hydrogen energy levels, right? So it's like I could do all the problems. I just did not have any intuition for where this parent super important equation came from. Now down the line, remember I was preparing for my own lecture and I was trying to understand how waves travel in self-gravitating disks.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the initial conditions by some infinitesimal amount, some minor change in your calculation to start with, you would get a different answer. This is one part of the reason why planetary systems are so diverse. You don't have like a very predictive path for you start with a disk of this mass and it's around this star, therefore you're going to form the solar system. You start with this, and therefore you will form this huge set of outcomes and some percentage of it will resemble the solar system”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beyond three. The simulating them is not a hopeless pursuit, but the outcome becomes a statistical one. What's actually quite interesting is I think we have all the equations figured out, right? Like, you know, in order to really understand this, the formation of the solar system suffices to know gravity and magnetohydrodynamics. I mean, like the combination of Maxwell's equations and Naveer Stokes equations for the fluids, you need to know quantum mechanics to understand opacities and so on. But we have those equations in hand. It's not that we don't have that understanding. It's that putting it all together is a very, very difficult and B, if you were to run the same evolution twice, changing”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now look Yeah, so The fact that you go from analytically solvable to unpredictable, you know, when your simulation goes from two bodies to three bodies, should immediately tell you that the exercise of trying to engineer a calculation where you form the entire solar system from scratch and hope to have some predictive answer is a futile one, right? We will never succeed at such a simulation.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two objects analytically solvable. Like, we can figure it out very easily if you just, you don't even, I don't think you, yeah, you don't need to know calculus. It helps to know calculus, but you don't necessarily need to know calculus. Three objects that are gravitationally interacting, the solution is chaotic. Doesn't matter how many simulations you do. The answer loses meaning after some time.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, we'll get to building the universe from scratch in a sec. But let me just kind of go through the hierarchy of what we do.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it's super easy. I mean, it's just not that hard But let's ask the most kind of basic problem. So the problem of having a star and something in orbit of it, that you don't need a simulation for. Like you can just write that down on a piece of paper.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's rare and moreover, like you don't even have to go to our calculations. You can just ask the night sky how many stars have Jupiter and Saturn analogs? The answer is Jupiter and Saturn analogs are found around only 10% of sun-like stars. They themselves, like you kind of have to score an A minus or better on the test, on the planet formation test to become a solar system analog even in that basic sense. And moreover, lower mass stars, which are very numerous in the galaxy, so-called M dwarves, think like zero percent of them, well, maybe like a negligible fraction of them have giant planets. Giant planets are a rare outcome of planet formation. One of the really big problems that remain unanswered is why. Understand why they're so rare.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's like a disc that's kind of thin. It's like a, yeah, it's something that is a disc that's so thin it's almost flirting with being a ring.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like one of the larger. Yeah, what actually happens in these calculations you leave behind A rather mass depleted. Remnant disc only a couple earth masses. So Then from that remnant population, annulus of material, over About 100 million years by just collisions, you grow the earth and the moon and everything else.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, because you have to solve the problem of the evolution of the gas disk, the evolution of Jupiter's orbit in the gas disk, plus the evolution of Saturn's and their mutual interaction. The common outcome of solving that problem, though, is pretty easy to explain. Jupiter forms its orbit shrinks, and then once Saturn forms, its orbit catches up basically to the orbit of Jupiter and they both come out. There's this inward outward pattern of Jupiter's early motion that happens sort of within the last million years of the lifetime of the solar system's primordial disk. So while this is happening, Our calculations are correct, which I think they are, you can destroy this inner system of few Earth-mass planets. And then in the aftermath of all this violence, you form the terrestrial planets.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're pretty certain that giant planets like Jupiter, when they form, they migrate. The reason they migrate is on a detailed level, perhaps difficult to explain, but just in a qualitative sense, they form in this fluid disk of gas and dust. So it's kind of like saying, okay, if I plop down a raft somewhere in the ocean, will it stay where you plop it down or will it kind of get carried around? It's not really a good analogy because it's not like Jupiter is being vected by the currents of gas and dust. But the way it migrates is it carves out a hole in the disk and then through by interacting with the disk gravitationally, it can change its orbit. The fact that the solar system has both Jupiter and Saturn here complicates things a lot.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sun is not some special star that decided that it was going to form the solar system. So I think the natural thing to assume is that the same processes of planet formation that occurred everywhere else also occurred in the solar system following this logic. It's not implausible to imagine that the solar system once possessed a system of intra Mercurian, like compact system of planets. So then we asked ourselves, would such a system survive to this day? And the answer is no. At least our calculations suggest it's highly unlikely because of the formation of Jupiter. And Jupiter's primordial kind of wandering through the solar system would have sent this collisional field of debris that would have pushed that system of planets onto the sun.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I was to say what was the kind of the key outcome of searches for extrasolar planets, it is that most stars are encircled by short period planets that are a few earth masses, right? So a few times bigger than the Earth and have orbital periods that kind of range from days to weeks. Now, if you go and ask the solar system what's in our region, right, in that region, it's completely empty, right? It's just astonishingly hollow. And think from...”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is deeply connected to the fact that Earth took about 100 million years to form. So we missed that train, so to speak, to get that hydrogen helium atmosphere. That's why actually we can see the sky. That's why the sky is, well, at least in most places, that's why the atmosphere is not completely opaque. With that, you know, kind of thinking in mind, I would argue that we're getting the kind of emergent pictures that the Earth is not. Everywhere, right? There's sort of the sci-fi view of things where we go to some other star and we just land on random planets and they're all Earth-like. That's totally not true. But Even a low probability event, even if you imagine that Earth is a one in a million or one in 10 million occurrence, there are 10 to the 12 stars in the galaxy. So you always win by large numbers. That's right, by supply.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so Earth is not a common outcome of the planet formation process. It's probably something on the order of maybe a 1% effect. And by Earth, I mean not just an Earth mass planet. I mean the architecture of the solar system that allows the Earth to exist in its kind of very temperate way. One thing to understand, and this is pretty crucial, right, is that the Earth itself formed well after the gas disk that formed the giant planets had already dissipated. You see, stars start out with the star and then a disk of gas and dust that encircles it. From this disk of gas and dust, big planets can emerge. And we have over the last two, three decades discovered thousands of extrasolar planets. It's an orbit of other stars. What we see is that many of them have these expansive hydrogen helium atmospheres. The fact that the Earth doesn't”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This idea of life kind of traveling between places, it's not entirely implausible, but you really have to twist, I think, a lot of parameters. One of the problems we have is we don't actually know how life originates, right? So it's kind of a second order question of survival in the interstellar medium and how resilient it is because we think you require water, but and that's certainly the case for the earth, but we really don't know for sure. That said, I will argue that the question of like, are there aliens out there is a very boring question because the answer is, of course, there are. I mean, like. We know that. There are planets around almost every star. Course, there are other life forms. Life is not some specific thing that happened on the earth and that's it, right? That's a statistical impossibility.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably a negligible amount. Zero, you know, like zero with like a plus on top, right? If you and I took a little trip to the interstellar medium, I think we would develop cancer and die real fast, right? Yeah, it's a pretty hostile radiation environment. You don't actually have to go to the interstellar medium. You just have to leave the Earth's magnetic field. And then you're not doing so well suddenly.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. We've seen a couple of them in the last three or so years, maybe four years now. One, the first one was the one called Uamuamua. It's been all over the news. The second one was Comet Borisov, discovered by a guy named Borisov. Yeah, so the way you know they're coming from elsewhere is unlike solar system objects which travel on elliptical paths around the sun these guys travel on hyperbolic paths so they come in say hello and then they're gone and the fact that they exist Totally not surprising, right? Neptune is constantly ejecting Kuiper belt objects into interstellar space. Our solar system itself is sort of leaking icy debris and ejecting it. Presumably every planetary systems or on other stars do exactly the same thing.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's completely collisionless out there, the physical radii of objects are so small compared to the distance between them, right? It's just, it is truly a collisionless environment. I don't know. I think that probably in the age. The solar system There have literally been zero collisions in the word cloud.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason these long period comets appear on very, very long time scales, these Oort cloud objects that are sitting 30,000 times as far away from the sun as is the Earth actually interact with the gravity of the galaxy that tied effectively the tide that the galaxy exerts upon them and their orbits slowly change and they elongate to the point where once they their closest approach to the sun starts to reach a critical distance where ice starts to sublimate, then we discover them as comets because then the ice comes off of them. They look beautiful on the night sky, etc. But they're all coming from. Know really, really far away.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like a sphere. It's like it's an almost spherical structure that engulfs, that encircles the sun. And all the long period comets come from the Oort cloud. They come, the way that they appear, I mean, for already, I don't know, hundreds of years, we've been detecting occasionally like a comet will come in. seemingly comes out of nowhere.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, if you keep moving out, eventually once you're at sort of 10,000 to 100,000 roughly, that's where the Oort cloud is. Now, the Oort cloud is a distinct population of icy bodies and is distinct from the Kuiper belt. In fact, it's so expansive that it ends roughly halfway between us and the next star. Its edge is just dictated by to what extent does the solar gravity reach?”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you've got the main Kuiper belt, which is about, say, 1.3, 1.5. Then you have something called the scattered disk, which is kind of an extension of the Kuiper belt. It's a bunch of these long, very elliptical orbits that hug the orbit of Neptune but come out very far. So the scattered disk with the current senses, like some of the longest orbits we know of have Semi major axis, so half the orbit length, roughly speaking, of about a thousand, a thousand times the distance between the Earth and Sun.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, sure, yeah, like the first detection you make, all you know is where it is in the sky and how far away it is. Something is 500 times away from the sun, as far away from the sun as is the Earth, you know that's planet nine. That's when the story concludes. Then you can study it”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, sure. Oh, sure. In fact, these things are hard to predict, but there's a new observatory called the Vera Rubin Observatory, which is coming online maybe next year. I mean, with COVID, these things are... Little bit more uncertain, but they've actually been making great progress with construction. And so that telescope is going to sort of scan the night sky every day automatically. And just it's such an efficient survey that it might increase the census of the distant Kuiper belt, the things that I'm interested in by a factor of 100. I mean, that would be really cool.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Additional Orbit is basically described by six parameters, so you at least need six independent points, but in reality you need many more observations to really pin down the orbit well.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then to get some confident information about what its orbit looks like, you have to come back a year later and then measure it again.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least three nights because oftentimes asteroids, which are much closer to the Earth, will appear To move only slightly, but then on the third night we'll move away. So that third night is really there to detect acceleration. The thing that I didn't really realize until I started observing together with my partner in crime and all this, Mike Brown, is just the fact that for the first year when you make these detections, the only thing you really know with confidence is where it is on the night sky and how far away it is. That's it. You don't know anything about the orbit because over three days the object just moves so little, right? That whole motion on the sky is entirely coming from motion of the Earth. So, the Earth is kind of the car, the object is the tree, and you see it”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the way you know is it appears in almost exactly the same part of the sky except for moves by it. And this is why actually you need.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no. I don't know. I haven't checked for that. The way it works is if you discover one, you right away get a license plate for it. So like the first four numbers is the first year that this object has appeared on. In the data set, if you will. And then there's like this code that follows it, which basically tells you where in the sky it is. So one of the really interesting Kuiper belt objects, which is very much part of the Planet Nine story, is called VP113, because Joe Biden was vice president at the time, you know, got nicknamed Biden.”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, these are just big icles, basically, that are just reflecting sunlight back at you. It's then easy to understand why it's so hard to discover them because light has to travel to, you know, something like 40 times the distance. Between the Earth and the Sun, and then get reflected back”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the actual stuff we see in the Kuiper belt. The way you go about discovering Kuiper Belt objects, it's pretty easy. I mean, it's easy in theory, right? Hard in practice. All you do is you take snapshots of the sky, choose that direction, say, and take the high exposure snapshot, then you wait a night and you do it again, and then you wait another night and you do it again. Objects that are just random stars in the galaxy don't move. On the sky, whereas objects in the solar system will slowly move. This is no different than if you're driving down the freeway. It looks like trees are going by you faster than the clouds. This is parallax. It's just they're reflecting light off of the sun, and it's going back and hitting”
2021-07-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source