Image credit: ESA
Where is the Oort Cloud and what is it made of? Why do we think some comets come from there? If the Oort Cloud exists, how did it form? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION (AUTO-GENERATED)
One of my favorite parts about the force of gravity. And don't tell anyone, but it just might be my favorite force, but then all the others are so cool. But, anyway, different episode. One of my favorite parts about the force of gravity is how quiet it is, how soft it is. It's by far the weakest force, and that is no exaggeration.
It's like it's even if it was a billion times stronger, it'd still be the weakest force, but it's persistent. It's persistent. It's quiet, but persistent in how this can make it sinister, almost. It's the ultimate example of soft power. It shapes and sculpts and guides you without you really realizing it.
This this episode is about the Oort Cloud, the home of the comets, but really it's an episode about whispers and influence and patience. Gravity is subtle. It's weak, but it doesn't give up. It may offer a little suggestion here or a helping hand there, and and if it doesn't change your mind now, it's not worried. If it doesn't change your mind in a thousand years, it's not bothered.
Gravity plays the long game. A million years, a billion years, that's the domain where gravity's true strength shines. This is something gravity does that no other force is capable of. Gravity is so weak, it's so quiet, you don't even know when you're under its spell. A little nudge to your orbit here, a a shifting of your speed there.
It doesn't take much and you won't notice, but gravity will still be there. Still whispering in your ear. Still smiling. And then before you know it, after spending tens of thousands of years in blissful complacency, you'll find yourself on an inescapable path, a trajectory that will lead directly to your death. And gravity will just keep smiling.
Our story takes place at the extreme edge of the solar system, and it's it's hard to even define out here what it means to be in the solar system. One definition is is the heliopause, where the solar wind, the stream of high energy particles constantly emanating from our sun, mixes with the general galactic background of particles, the interstellar medium. And this is a a useful definition of the boundary of interstellar space. And this is generally where the Voyager probes are right now. Or hello listeners to the far future where other missions have already reached this milestone along with the Voyager probes, but right now the Voyager probes are there.
It's roughly a hundred times further from the sun than the Earth is. Roughly a hundred AU, astronomical units. Hundred times further away from the sun than the earth is. To reach this distance, it takes light about eight hours. Contrast that with the eight minutes it takes to reach the earth.
Light from the Sun takes eight minutes to reach the Earth, eight hours to reach the heliopause. It took the Voyager missions going a little bit slower than light. It took them four decades to do it, but that's only one boundary. That's only one because the gravitational influence of the Sun really stretches to infinity. You could be on the other side of the Milky Way.
Heck, the other side of the universe, and technically, you'd still feel an ever so slight tugging from the Sun. Imagine yourself floating in space at, say, 20,000 astronomical units. That's 20,000 times further from the Sun than the Earth and 200 times further than the heliopause. If you rode one of the Voyager probes to get here, it would have taken you about eight thousand years of traveling. 20,000 AU.
The sun is still dominant in the sky that surrounds you. You would see thousands of stars across your field of view, and one would stand out. But it wouldn't be a disk. It's more like a sharp point, a single stab of light that's brighter than the thousands of others. Out here at this distance, it's cold, almost absolute zero, and it's lonely.
There may be trillions of other rocks around here, each more than a mile or kilometer across, totaling five or 10 times the mass of the Earth, but you'll never meet anybody ever. Your nearest neighbor is millions of miles away. And even though you are 10 times further away than the heliopause, 200 times further away than the heliopause, even at these extreme distances, even though the sun is just a slightly brighter point in the sky, that sun is still capable of talking to you, of influencing you, Extremely weakly and only gently, but still there, its gravity remains. And if you and the sun were the only things in the universe, then you could stay in long, lazy orbits around our star forever. Our sun would continue to whisper to you, keeping you company in the dark.
But out here in the cold, in the depth of the endless night that is interstellar space, you begin to hear other voices. You yourself are a mix of rock and ices one or two miles across. This is all you've known for almost your entire life. This is your home. This is the familiar.
The temperature is near absolute zero. The sun barely another star. Complete isolation. You're in orbit around the sun barely tied to it from its weak gravitational influence. It takes you thousands of years to make a single trip, but round and round you go, orbit after orbit in quiet solitude.
In your orbit, you follow the path of a long stretched ellipse. In some points of your orbit, you're closer to the sun than others. Although closer doesn't have much meaning out here, and at other points, you're further. But if you have a memory that spans hundreds of thousands of years, you'll notice something changing, and that change is due to a quiet, unassuming gravitational voice that's not from the sun. It's not that voice, the familiar voice of the sun, the one you've been following for eons, but something else far larger, far more powerful.
The gravitational voice of the Milky Way galaxy itself. It's a matter of densities. At one end of your orbit, the collection of stars and gas and dust surrounding you at interstellar distances is ever so slightly different than the collection at the other end of your orbit. It's an incredibly tiny difference, but it does exist. And anywhere densities are different, gravity has the power to speak.
This is what we call the galactic tide. At the point in your orbit furthest from the sun, the Milky Way can whisper to you softly suggesting you move ever so slightly further from the sun than your last orbit. You nudge, pulled just a little bit. And with each revolution, each orbit, your maximum distance, your furthest distance from the sun grows just a tiny bit bigger. But the Sun has not forgotten about you and still whispers into your ear.
Orbits are orbits and ellipses are ellipses. If you stretch out the long side of an ellipse, you squeeze the short side, While the galaxy itself tempts you and pulls you farther from the sun, makes that furthest point even further every orbit, your closest distance to the sun shrinks. Your perihelion, the word we give to your closest approach to the sun in an orbit, shrinks and shrinks while your aphelion, your furthest point grows and grows. And by the time you notice what's happening, it's too late. You find yourself careening closer and closer to the sun, and the closer you get, the stronger its voice grows.
20,000 AU becomes a thousand, which becomes 5,000. 20 thousand AU becomes 10,000 which becomes 5,000, a thousand, a hundred. For the first time in perhaps your entire life, you cross the inner boundary of the heliopause. The the sun is no longer whispering to you now, it's shouting. 100 AU becomes 50.
Another first for you. You're not alone. It's not just you, the distant sun, and the far flung stars in your universe, smaller icy bodies like yourself, huge looming spheres of ice and rock with moons of their own, and gas atmospheres patrol these strange lands. To you, it's crowded down here. 50 AU becomes 10.
The sun transforms from a single point of light to a disc of blazing energy. The shouting of gravity becomes a scream. You've never felt intense heat and radiation like this before. You've never moved this fast before. Everything is a rush.
You start to panic. 10 AU becomes five. More voices shout in your ears. Worlds far larger than anything you've ever seen before. So big that they envelop themselves in thick layers of swirling knotted atmosphere around themselves.
So gigantic that their voices compete with the sun itself. Thankfully, they're on the other side of the solar system now, but even from here, you can hear their suggestions and feel their influence, and you shudder to think what would happen if they were closer. Five AU becomes one. You're no longer in control of your own motion. A headlong rush closer and closer to the sun, its heat and radiation is too intense.
You can feel yourself boiling. The ices that made up your body evaporating into space, leaving a dusty trail a million miles long. Your surface creaks and heaves as the gases escape. You're too small to hold yourself together with your own gravity. One AU becomes zero.
You've never been this close to the sun before. You've never seen anything this close before. You can feel yourself melting, evaporating, disintegrating as the heat from the star overwhelms you. Its gravitational voice is the only thing in your ears, a thunderous base that shakes your rocky bones. Then at a million miles per hour, your mile wide body falls apart by the second.
After millions of years of peaceful quiet solitude in the outermost reaches of the solar system, under the spell of the subtle suggestions of the galactic tide in a journey inwards of a quarter of a light year, experiencing voices in forces completely unfamiliar in your history, You plunge into the surface of the sun itself, its voice, the last thing you hear as you sleep. Finally. This is our best story behind the origins of some comets. Not all comets, of course. There are many that we can track that stay within the confines of the solar system, looping inwards every few decades.
But many comets are new. They've never been tracked before, and they arrive from any random direction. And some comets are not only new but have tremendously long orbits lasting more than two hundred years. We give them the name of long period comets. But there is a puzzle here.
Comets do not last long. They simply can survive multiple passages through the solar system. Either they'll be eaten by the sun, as in the case of our little story, or they'll shut off their ices exhausted making them essentially undetectable, or they'll encounter one of the giant planets and that gravitational influence will kick them out of the Solar System altogether. So there has to be a reservoir of comets, a storage place where they can persist for millions or even billions of years before an unlucky member plunges down the gravitational well and heads into the inner solar system. The name we give to this reservoir is the Oort cloud after the astronomer Jan Oort who convincingly argued for its existence.
He pointed out that if you trace the orbits of new comets backwards, if you reconstruct their entire orbits, they seem to come from a region about 20,000 astronomical units from the sun. That is their shared orbital aphelion, their furthest distance. In order to explain all the data, the fact that comets come from any direction, That there must be a source of comets? Of new ones? And this source appears to be 20,000 AU away?
The only conclusion is Patreon. Patreon.com/pmsutter is how you keep this show going. Thank you so much for your contributions, and stay tuned for the end of the episode for a major life announcement. Short version is I'm leaving my job and it's all your fault. Long version comes after the episode.
No, that was not the conclusion Jan Oort came to. He came to the conclusion of a cloud, a reservoir of long period comets at the very distant edges of the solar system. We call it today in his honor, of course, the Oort Cloud. It's hard to tell how big the Oort Cloud is, but because we can't see it directly. We've never observed a member of the Oort Cloud actually inside the Oort Cloud.
We only have messengers from them when they send them into the inner solar system, and we have to try to deduce the properties of the Oort Cloud from the behavior of their messengers. There's an interesting parallel here. Even the history of understanding comets and the realization that the Oort Cloud might even exist is a story of whispers. You need multiple centuries of observations to learn which comets repeat and why, which ones are new, how to calculate orbits, the whole deal. I look at comets as a fine example of what I call generational astronomy.
We must rely on the accurate records of our ancestors to come to these conclusions. And when it comes to the Oort Cloud, we think it has at least a trillion major members where major means at least a kilometer or so across. But it's spread out over a tremendous volume. The innermost boundary is somewhere between one and two thousand AU away, and the outermost could be 50,000 to 200,000 AU away. That's a handful of light years.
That's getting close to our nearest neighbor stars. The outer boundary is generally set by something called the Hill sphere, where the sun's gravitational influence, however weak, is still the most important voice that a satellite or object might feel. This sphere changes with time as other stars pass near our solar system as giant molecular clouds pass near our solar system, and so the outermost boundary of the Oort cloud probably changes with time. Interestingly, the inner boundary of the Oort cloud is much harder to understand than the outer boundary. Why?
Because Jupiter, that's why. The galactic tide that I talked about in the story, this difference in density from one side of the Solar System to the other, affects high eccentricity comets. It affects comets with orbits that already have high ellipticity. A lot of their orbit is a long stretched ellipse. It's very far away from circular.
It can only affect those high ellipticity or high eccentricity orbits because you need there to be differences from orbit to orbit and you need those differences to be as far away from the Sun as possible. Because the further you are away from the Sun, the less influence it has on you and the more susceptible you are to the influence of the galactic tide. And, if we're seeing a brand new comet, then that comet basically can't have had an encounter with the planets on its way in because if that comet that's been affected by the galactic tide begins its journey into the inner solar system and it encounters, it comes near Jupiter or Saturn, that giant planet will either eject in, give it just the right gravitational boost to kick it out of the Solar System altogether, or it will lock it in. It will sap energy from the orbit of the comet and bring it in closer permanently. We call this the Jupiter barrier.
Jupiter acts as a barrier in our solar system. Saturn, too, but Jupiter is bigger, so it gets named after Jupiter and not Jupiter and Saturn, but I'm not in charge of naming things. So if we see a long period comet, if if a comet comes into view and generates a tail and we can see the whole thing, it must come from more than 20,000 AU away because it's only at those distances that you can get the really stretched out orbits and the long orbits so that they can start and end their plunge into the inner solar system in one go. If you're closer than 20,000 AU, then you can't have a very elliptical orbit because you'd already be inside the solar system, the inner solar system, and it would take you multiple passes. Like, if this galactic tide is acting on you and your orbit is shrinking and shrinking and changing character and squeezing and squeezing, and if it takes multiple orbits to finally get you into the inner Solar System, then they're almost guaranteed to encounter Jupiter or Saturn in one of those orbits just by chance, and then they'll get caked out.
So it's only the most distant comets with the biggest ellipitics that very, very quickly transform, and in their first orbit that takes them into the inner solar system, they make it all the way. So we have less understanding of the inner regions of the Oort Cloud than we do of the outer regions. But taken together, the whole Oort Cloud, we have a slight puzzle with this picture. If the Galactic Tide can only act on the high eccentricity comets, the comets with orbits with very very strong ellipses very very far away from circles. Well, we've had this solar system for a few billion years now.
Shouldn't we have run out of those kinds of comets long ago? Like like three and a half billion years ago, all the comets that just randomly had those kinds of orbits ended up transferring into the inner solar system or getting kicked out. We should have run out a long time ago. So we think what happens is that the interactions with stars as stars pass by our solar system or giant molecular clouds pass by our solar system, just the random motion of objects within a galaxy, sometimes those interactions can inject comets directly. They'll swing by.
They'll disturb the Oort Cloud, send some of those comets plunging into the inner solar system. But they can also reshuffle the Oort Cloud, resupply, put some new comets on some high eccentricity orbits where they then begin to be influenced by the galactic tide and begin their journey inwards. We think. Even if this picture is right, new comets really really are new. Only 10%, and this is, we get this from simulation, only 10% of the comets that enter the inner solar system survive 50 passages, 50 orbits.
And only 1% survive 2,000 orbits. The majority of comets that enter our solar system eventually die. The vast majority relatively quickly compared to their total lifespan. They'll spend billions of years in the Oort Cloud and then like a thousand years orbiting within the inner solar system. Comets, once they get kicked out of the Oort Cloud, they're either ejected completely or they're killed.
That's just their fate. And it's wonderful to look at all the gravitational nudges and whispers and secrets that get passed around in the life of a comet, like all the little influences that it encounters. The comets are influenced by the sun, of course, by the galactic tide, by passing stars, by gas clouds, by the giant planets, All these competing forces, and all of them weak, all of them weak, shape and sculpt the Oort Cloud itself and how comets get drained from it. The vast majority of comets remain in the Oort Cloud for essentially forever. It's only a few unlucky ones that get pulled out or pulled in.
And if gravity is affecting the Oort Cloud now, then it must have affected the Oort Cloud in the past, which means gravity must have formed the Oort Cloud. And this is the most challenging part of understanding the Oort Cloud. We have a hard time understanding the formation of the planets in the Solar System, let alone these tiny bits of icy debris. And what we think happens is that the whole Oort cloud is just the comet's story that I just told but played in reverse. As the solar system forms, a few big planets coalesce plus lots of tiny bits left over.
They all interact in complicated ways, a very complicated gravitational dance, and I'd love to tell that story. Feel free to ask. And it's like trying to find your way through a crowded party with everyone wanting to chat with you. You get you get pulled here and there. You get you get distracted.
You get pulled into someone's orbit, interact with them a little bit, then, oh, someone else someone else taps you on your shoulder, and and now you get pulled into a different orbit. And you're just trying to make it over to the cheese buffet. I mean, come on. That is your goal, but you keep getting distracted. You get keep getting pulled in different directions.
And so the debris from all these countless interactions can get reshuffled, and they generally get pushed out to a region called the scattered disk, which is again a different episode. And then from there, they're in very unstable orbits. They're not exactly sure where they're gonna get up. They're not exactly sure where they're gonna go. Some comets get lifted from the scattered disk to the Oort Cloud, and some get knocked back down.
So it's the story of generating an Oort cloud is the same as the story of generating a comet but played in reverse of transfers of orbits from one place to another based on exchanging energy of there's an interaction here, which pushes a comment to somewhere else where it can't stay long, interactions there push it somewhere else even further. And then it'll live in the Orico Cloud for a very very long time and then through chance interactions or influence of the galactic tide can be pulled back down. The difficulty with this picture, this is like our best guess of the formation of the Orico Cloud is that it's messy. Messy. Most of the junk, in order for this story to work, most of the junk just gets ejected completely.
Right? You have to be on just the razor's edge in terms of energy to get mostly kicked out of the solar system, but not so much that you just wander the galaxy, but you still hang on in these very very big orbits. That's a relatively rare thing. Like, imagine if you're a baby comet in the newborn solar system and you encounter baby Jupiter, which is already gigantic. Of the million ways that you could possibly interact with Jupiter Different directions and trajectories, all that.
Only a small percentage of those will send you into the Oort Cloud. Most of them will kill you outright or eject you from the solar system. You have to have just the right energy. And in simulations, so we this is how we understand it again is through simulations of the formation of the solar system. You need something like 100 times the mass of the Earth in comet proto like proto comets in the early solar system, and then you're gonna lose 95% of it and the remainder ends up in the Oort Cloud.
That seems excessive. I mean, we have no idea, but it seem it it feels a little off. And this model predicts a relationship between the scattered disk, which is this intermediate region between the solar system and the Oort Cloud, and the Oort Cloud itself. They should be in contact exchanging material back and forth. Like, if an object ends up in the scattered disk, there's a good chance that it will then migrate outwards into the Oort Cloud.
And if something's in the Oort Cloud and it finds its way coming into the solar system, it should make a pit stop in the scattered disk before it comes down into the solar system. But the models of how these two features, these two regions, the scattered disk and the Oort cloud, should be connected don't seem to match the observed relationship. We we don't seem to get as much transfer out of the Oort Cloud into the Scatter Disk and as much transfer from the Scatter Disk into the Oort Cloud, you know, vice versa as the models will suggest. So where do we go from there? Well, that's gonna have to be a different episode.
We have a very rough idea of how the Oort Cloud formed. We have a much better idea of how the Oort Cloud sends comets into the inner solar system. And again, it's all from simulation. And the Oort Cloud is a hypothesis. It is a hypothesis.
Do we know, which is the question of the episode, do we know that the Oort Cloud exists? Does it real is it really there? Well, it's a hypothesis built from inference, you know, built from taking the available data and drawing conclusions from the available data. That is science. That is all of science, and this is a particular application of science.
We know that comets have to come from somewhere because they weren't here before, and now they're here. You know, they could come from random places in the galaxy. Like, comets just just soak, scatter around like like bugs throughout the galaxy and then they randomly encounter solar systems and and come on in. But based on the data, again, based on the data, no. It looks like there's a reservoir of comets outside hanging out just outside the solar system, and every once in a while, they send in a messenger.
Observing comets in the Oort Cloud is almost impossible. It's not 100% impossible. There have been some proposed missions to study the Oort Cloud itself. We can maybe do it with a with a very carefully designed satellite. So we can't see it.
We can't see members of the Oort Cloud in the Oort Cloud. How do we know the properties of the Oort Cloud? We know it through the messengers, through the comets that do come into the inner solar system. We can observe those. We can study those.
We know it through modeling. We know it through simulations. We know it through math. Through math, this is application of physics. Physics is the mathematical description of nature, and here we are.
We have comets that enter the inner solar system, and we're trying to build up a mathematical model that's coherent with all the data. And there's no reason and and that, by the way, that leads to the conclusion of an org cloud even though we can't see it directly. And there's no reason to believe or there's no good reason to believe that the org cloud doesn't exist. There's been nothing pointing and saying, hey. Hey.
Here's an observation. Like, check out this. This says that an org cloud doesn't even exist. Even though there are flaws in our current understanding and there's a lot of incomplete information, we don't know how big the org cloud is. We don't know how many members it has.
There's a lot of fuzziness about how the Oort Cloud formed. We don't fully understand how comets originate in the Oort Cloud and make it down. Even though there's a lot we don't understand, there's nothing there's no data that says no, OrCloud can't exist because of this. That's not here. And we have the compelling evidence that it should exist, so we're gonna go with it for now.
And this highlights the importance of the role of math. We can know things in science without directly observing it. And this is crucially important and very very underrated because objection is, oh, if if we can see it, if we can't directly observe it, then, you know, how can you possibly know it exists? I'm not saying you're saying that, but I've people have asked me that before. If you can't directly observe something, how do you know it exists?
Well, because we have a body of evidence. Just because you don't see the murderer, you don't have a picture of a murder, you still have the crime scene, don't you? You still know about the murderer even if you don't know who the murderer is. I don't know why I picked a very, very violent crime for this analogy, but that's the one I picked. My notes just said pick pick an analogy, and that's the one that came to my head.
The Oort Cloud isn't sending photons to it. It's not it's not to us. It's not sending light to us. We can't take a picture of it, but it is sending chunks of icy rocks, isn't it? It's a lot.
Every once in a while, it's like, here you go. Here's another one. Five years later, here's another one. Decade later, here's another one. It's sending things to us that we can observe and that is an observation.
Sometimes nature only speaks in whispers, and you need the right ears to listen. Thank you so much to Marshall S. Via Email for asking the question that led to today's episode. And, I'm about to do, like, the little special announcement y thing, but remember, you can ask me questions on askaspaceman@gmail.com. Go to the website, askaspaceman.com.
Follow me on social media at paul mattsutter. All that good stuff. Send me questions. Keep the show going. Speaking of the show, it's not going anywhere.
Don't worry. We're coming up on almost four years of Ask a Spaceman. That is incredible. Like, when I started this four years ago, it was just a random idea. Like, yeah.
I'll start a podcast. Sure. Seems like everyone else is doing. I might as well start. It was just for fun.
Just for fun. And it blew up from there. It blew up. I got a great audience, which thank you so much. Sending me so many questions, so enthusiastic.
I mean, just just I am in awe of your curiosity. It's been great to share that curiosity and the joy of finding things out with you over the past four years. You've seen over the journey of this podcast, I've dropped little things here and there about new opportunities that have opened up to me, about new directions, about building this crazy science communication thing that is now a huge part of my life that four or five years ago was zero part of my life, and I have you to thank for. It's been your support. It's been your encouragement.
It's been your curiosity. It keeps me going every single day. And you've seen all these, like, crazy crazy strange projects I do, like Song of the Stars, like the whole AstroTaurus thing, the space radio, and and, most recently the book. And now I realize I only share things with you when I'm begging you for money, and I'm I really don't have any shame about that. What you may not have known is that for the past three years, I've had two day jobs.
I've had a split appointment. I've had a halftime position at The Ohio State University and a half time position at the Center of Science and Industry, the big science center here in Columbus, Ohio. Especially on this podcast, I didn't talk about those jobs a lot. If if you follow me on, like, space radio or on social media, I do talk about those jobs, but here on this podcast, I haven't talked about those jobs a lot. I'm here to tell you that I have decided to leave my position as chief scientist at the Center of Science and Industry.
Why? Well, it's it's time to move on. I'm heading in a particular direction of education and outreach and communication, and that particular direction puts on a lot of demands on my time. You know? I I can't be everywhere at once.
I can't be in every meeting. I can't I can't do all the things as much as I try. And so I had to give something up. Something had to give, and I decided to to risk it. I decided to push in this direction of science communication for half my time.
I'm still maintaining my appointment at Ohio State University, but now half my time will not have a job associated with it. The job will be this. We'll be talking about science. And one of the major things that has contributed to this this decision is the Patreon support. Your Patreon contributions have helped me grow, have helped me build things that share science with new audiences.
And, like I said, this led to attention. This, you know, more and more of my time is being devoted to science communication in response to, like, the Patreon community and YouTube and the radio show and writing the book and all that. And I had to pick my priorities. I had to pick where I focused my energies, and I picked you. I've always told you, and it's been true, that your Patreon contributions haven't gone been going to pay my mortgage, haven't been going to pay my grocery bills.
I had a job that paid for that stuff. And then your Patreon con contributions paid for the other things, paid for new science communication things. You got space radio out there. You got song of the stars out there. You got Astro Tours funded to start to make that experience happen.
You you gave me the the tools I needed to be able to write my book. Like, all that was because of Patreon. Well, starting this month, your Patreon contributions are gonna help pay my mortgage. They are gonna buy my groceries. They are gonna pay for health insurance.
No pressure on you whatsoever. But the point of this is because I can rely on the Patreon contributions and, you know, other science communication things I do, like freelance writing, all those other projects I do, all the fun stuff, it will free up more of my time to do the things I love, which is share how science sees the universe Through this podcast, through YouTube, through writing, through radio, you name it. If there's an audience, and this is my mission, if there is an audience, I want to find a way to share science with them in a way that they enjoy. If you haven't already jumped on the Patreon train but have been wanting to, now would be a good time. If you're already on the Patreon train and you've been interested, maybe intrigued in leveling up your contribution, now is also a good time.
If you just joined Patreon in the past couple months to get a free copy of my book, and that's it. Thank you for that, and I hope you like my book. If you're not interested at all in Patreon, that's cool too. I seriously will do this podcast no matter what job I have, no matter what I do, I will always make room in my life for Ask a Spaceman for telling these stories, for sharing science with you. That will never go away.
Unless I die or, you know, we get we finally achieve complete knowledge in time and space, which would be really awkward if those happen at the same time. But that's a different show. If you don't ever want to contribute to Patreon, no hard feelings. You have bills to pay too. I get it.
You have a life to live too. I totally get it. I totally understand. I understand that this show and science communication is interesting to you, but not a top priority. I get it.
And I'm never, never going to judge any of you or make you feel guilty. I'm still gonna do the cheesy, corny Patreon ads in the middle of the show. Still gonna do that. I'm still gonna keep this show ad free. I have continued to be approached by advertisers, and I turn them down all the time because I say, no.
This show is for the supporters. I would do this show for free, and so I want people to contribute to it of their own free will. I started this podcast with $0 from Patreon. I didn't even have a Patreon. I didn't even know what Patreon was.
I would continue this podcast if I had $0 from Patreon. But going forward, your Patreon contributions are going to support me and my family. Partially, I still have half a job, and I'm very lucky to have the appointment at the Ohio State University. And the whole point is to open up more hours of my day so I can do more stuff. So follow me on social media at paulmatt sutter.
Go to my website, pmsutter.com. That has links to all the public facing stuff I do. If I do something, even like a random interview, I put it on my website just so you can see what you're paying for. You're paying for science communication. You're paying for me working really hard as best I can to come up with ways to share science with new audiences.
So I encourage you to follow, check up on me, make sure you're getting good value for the dollar, and I can't thank you enough for the past four years of support and fun and wonder that we've had in sharing this crazy universe or universe of ours. I can't wait for more. And I can't wait to see where we go next in finding complete knowledge of time and space.