AaS! 209: What Secrets Are Hiding in Triton?

Ask a Spaceman!

Paul M. Sutter

Astrophysics, Science, Cosmos, Holes, Black, Astronomy, Natural Sciences, Universe, Cosmology, Space, Physics

4.8 • 853 Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2023

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What’s so cool about Triton? How did it end up in orbit around Neptune, and what can we learn from it? Could we send a mission there one day? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Sometimes astronomy is less like a science and more like a criminal forensics investigation.
0:16.5	You have a crime scene, blood, signs of a fight, an open window, and of course, a dead body,
0:22.5	still warm. Something happened, but we can't just rerun the past. There are no hidden cameras,
0:28.8	no eyewitnesses, no wire-tapped phones, just the scene itself full of clues. And it's from those
0:35.5	clues that we have to put together a plausible interpretation
0:38.6	of the past in what series of events led to that specific circumstance, namely a dead body on the
0:45.1	ground. Of course, there might be multiple plausible scenarios that we can concoct,
0:50.4	especially if the evidence is meager or open into interpretation. So it's our job to lay out all the
0:56.9	lines of evidence, offer plausible scenarios, and, well, I guess that's where the analogy ends,
1:02.9	because in a real police investigation, the goal is to find the killer and bring that person
1:06.9	to justice, whereas in astronomy, we can just keep arguing about it in conferences for
1:11.9	the rest of our lives. And the scene of our crime today is found in the outer solar system,
1:18.0	specifically the region around Neptune, which sits roughly 30 times further away from the
1:24.3	sun than the Earth does. At that distance, the sun is still recognizable as the sun, and not just a slightly brighter
1:31.0	than average star.
1:32.6	But even a hot summer day only reaches a balmy, negative 391 degrees Fahrenheit.
1:39.0	For you metric, folks, that's negative 235 degrees Celsius, but really at that temperature does
1:43.3	the conversion even matter?
1:44.7	It's just, it's just really cold.
1:48.6	The outer solar system is a lonely place.
1:52.3	Aside from Neptune and its moons, there's just, well, not much of anything.
1:56.4	Beyond the orbit of Neptune, since the Kuiper Belt, which is a ring of icy minor planets and
	...

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