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Astronomy cast episode 644 is the Earth normal. Welcome to Astronomy cast and weekly

facts based journey through the cosmos. We hope you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know. I'm Fraser Kane, the publisher of the universe today. I've been a space in astronomy journalist for over 20 years with me as always as Dr Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the planetary science institute and the director of cosmocrest. Hey Pamela how you doing? I am doing well. It is spring. We have 20 minutes but not today. Yes, so so I need to give the most.

Man, I don't even know how to describe this. I need to give the most. Weasel word written, excitement, potential, thing to do coming up. Okay, go for it. Okay, and so that is that there's potentially maybe possibly the greatest meteor storm in in.

Decades maybe centuries happening on the evening of May 30th or the morning of the 31st depending on where you live.

Yeah, so what happened was this comment on running the same name 73 P broke up in 1995 and the great Hubble pictures of this the comet expanded in brightness 400 times and tore itself apart. And we passed through the town

of the year. But this time it's possible that we're going to be passing through the point where the comet broke up and it all depends on the math. But what that means is that we could see not like when you go out and you watch the

meteor shower during the summer and you have like a really good time you're like who you're watching one meteor a minute 60 meters an hour during a meteor storm like the 98 lean ads or the 66 lean ads. People were seeing upwards of a thousand an hour and I saw them and they were

absolutely incredible. Yeah, so some predictions for this storm are I've seen 10,000 an hour 100,000 an hour. I've seen 40 meters a second, which is 140,000 an hour and with that comes a distribution of not just regular

meters, but also fireballs and everything. Bullides like it's going to be bonkers. But it's not certain. And so it's going to be peaking at 10 p.m. Pacific time on on May the 30th 1 a.m. Eastern time or 0500 universal time. And so that means it's best positioned for North

America South America a little bit of Europe. But don't like an old people are like, Oh, no, I'm in Australia. Oh, no, I'm in South Africa. Oh, no, I'm you know, don't like meteor storms are famously unpredictable. We get these we get these kinds of warnings all the time and they never show up. And so this almost certainly won't happen. But if it does it'll be amazing. And it'll it it's almost certain it'll be early or late. So don't panic. Just on the

night. Go out. And if it's happening like we'll see a rising meteor activity as we get closer and closer to the peak and then the peak happens and then we'll see declining meters. So everyone on earth should be able to get a shot at seeing as whether in the northern hemisphere, the southern hemisphere. This is for everybody could be the meter storm of a generation, but it could also be nothing. So don't yell at me.

This is an excuse to go camping if you like to go camping. This is an excuse to upgrade your hammock. If you're thinking maybe this summer, I need a better hammock. We won't be recording next Monday. It is Memorial Day here in the US. But also like I plan to use this is an excuse to put more hammocks in the backyard. Have people over and have a fire.

If you're in a city, like you're in the middle of a city, you'll still be able to see it. If you're there, it'll be it'll be like, look a minute, 40 a second. So the sky is going to be just it's going to be raining stars. And so you'd see more in the dark. You know, in the if you're far away from the sea lights, but you'll still see a lot if you're in a big city. So this is for everybody. Yeah. Everybody. And again, you know, we don't we don't guarantee this is going to happen.

And but the way I always say it is that you miss 100% of the meter storms that you don't stand outside to watch. It's true. So so don't blame me if you decide that to not watch it. And then it is turns out to be the storm of the century.

Get your bug spray. Get an old AMFM radio that you can tune in to hear them striking the atmosphere. Yeah. And then tell us what you saw. Awesome.

All right. We have done an episode about whether or not our solar system is normal. Now we want to talk about our planet. We've now discovered thousands of exoplanets.

We're learning more and more about the kinds of planetary systems that are out there across the universe, but our planets like Earth unique or totally rare.

So when we think about this idea of like is the is planet Earth normal, right? Like we now know of many, many exoplanets out there.

Are we getting a sense because like I think in the past we would think like in every star system, there will be a Venus like planet and an Earth like planet and a Mars like planet.

There will be a terrestrial planet in the habitable zone of the star and there could be life there. Are we getting a sense of of how similar Earth is to other kinds of terrestrial planets out there.

So we're in this super weird time right now where we have started finding rocky worlds. We have started finding things that are roughly the size of Earth, but we can't find them around some like stars yet.

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